Quotes About Writing

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

Writing an adaptation is not so much a collaboration as it is a series of steps. You're basically creating a blueprint for something else.

Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.

There are eight other instances in the book of Orwell noting the scents of his environment, most of them repugnant. There are two points to be made here. First, sensitivity to odor is a tic of much of his writing. Second, and more unsettling, it is the smell of humanity that repels him. When he notes the smells of nature, even of the barnyard, it is almost always with approval. In contrast, he is always ready to be horrified by mankind.

An even more telling side of that blindness was the way White spent his leisure time in those days. When not writing his editorials, designed either to puff Kansas business or elect the Republican ticket, he would pass the time composing "dialect verse

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers...but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.

Tout le monde voulait être dans le coup ce jour-là. Car, ce jour-là, on allait écrire l'Histoire avec un grand H. Il y avait eu un ghetto à Cracovie pendant plus de sept siècles, et voici qu'à la fin de la journée, ou au plus tard le lendemein, ces sept siècles ne seraient plus qu'une rumeur, et Cracovie serait enfin fiduciare (débarrassée des juifs).

writing a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows.

I think the worst way a writer can self-betray is by not being true to his or her experience of being alive. It's my belief, for what it's worth, that a lot of writers consign to the page what they think will meet with the approval, especially in the moral realm, of what their society has preached to them since they were children, almost all of which is utter bull####.

There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race — no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book.

To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Punctuation to the writer is like anatomy to the artist: he learns the rules so he can knowledgeably and controllédly depart from them as art requires. Punctuation is a means, and its end is: helping the reader to hear, to follow.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication.

Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or anything else. Not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his writing.

There are days when I intentionally don't write. For instance, I never write when I'm traveling, because travel is a situation where I can learn more by looking and listening than by working.

Question asked of Thomas Perry. What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? "If any writer is going to be remembered after he's gone, it will be for the parts of his work that are absolutely original, and would never have existed if he hadn't written them. So if you're writing a scene that you've read, watched, or heard before, then you're wasting your time and your reader's.

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

The Scripture is a love letter which the great God has written to us. We must not run it over in haste, but meditate upon God's wisdom in writing, and his love in sending it to us.