Quotes About Writing

You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward.

My salvation is to let all this roll over me, to write, write and write some more. To hammer keys until I am finger worn to the second joint and then to hammer keys some more. To pile up copy, stack up stories, roll the wordage and generally conduct my life along the one line of success I have ever had. I write.

A few years ago, I wrote Battlefield Earth to celebrate my golden anniversary as a writer. At nearly a half-million words, it was a bit larger than others I had turned out in my fifty-year career. But, after all, it was my anniversary so I decided to splurge.

Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activities are writing a review column for the local Rhinoceros Times and feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and raccoons on the patio.

You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

What is generally missed, is that my writing financed research.

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just learned that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

From 1909 to 1914, Lovecraft turned from adolescent to adult; but his life during this period is an almost utter blank. Apparently he sat at home, day after day, staying up most of the night and in bed all morning, reading voraciously, writing reams of Georgian poetry, and doing little else.

On July 6, 1906, Lovecraft acquired a used Remington typewriter. He never, however, took the next logical step: to learn to type by touch. All his life, he typed with his two forefingers, as did many writers of his generation like H. L. Mencken.

He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.

The same common-sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.

It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.

To express truth is to write naturally, forcibly, and delicately.

He who only writes to suit the taste of the age, considers himself more than his writings. We should always aim at perfection, and then posterity will do us that justice which sometimes our contemporaries refuse us.

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Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you.

His mind traced the arabesques and coils of an alphabet that looked like music sounded.

an apostrophe humbled to a comma.

A tale is a funny thing, and even when it's your own and you have a quill in your hand you must be careful where you touch it.

But a quill on paper was different from a stick on the bottom of a stream or a fingertip on my forearm. Its scratch was like the dry sparking of a flint and a page with fresh marks on it like a blazing porcupine. A tale written down must be like that , I thought. It must be like the block of wood of the body sprouting tiny tongues of fire and who knows where the next one will rise and burn.

The way you write dialogue is the same whether you're writing for movies or TV or games. We use movie scriptwriting software to write the screenplays for our games, but naturally we have things in the script that you would never have in a movie script -- different branches and optional dialogue, for example. But still, when it comes to storytelling and dialogue, they are very much the same.

Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light--instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth.