Quotes About Writing

I created the Katie Fforde Bursary because I was a nearly there writer for a long time. I found it a bit of a struggle to pay my annual subscription to the Romantic Novelists' Association so when I finally became published, I wanted to give something back. That's the bursary, a year's subscription and a place at the conference. It does seem to give people a valuable boost to their confidence. People can find out more about the Romantic Novelists' Association at www.rna-uk.org

My best advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot and write. Don't worry if you don't get your first, fifth or tenth novel published, if you keep going you'll make it. Also read how to write books as they may make the process a bit quicker.

We often describe women who write about pain or vulnerabilities as 'brave,' but this type of confession is so frequently exchanged, so par for the course, so deeply and comfortably ensconced in the language of female confidences, so nearly de rigueur in the kind of personal writing ascendant now, so deeply woven in the way women get along with each other in the world generally that bravery may not be quite the right word. It is, in a way, something more like capitulating.

What would happen, I wonder, if I stopped questioning and doubting what I do, stopped judging my own efforts, stopped critiquing the sentences I write, and begin instead to simply trust the process- not just the ups and downs of my work, but everything else as well, the endlessly evolving process of life itself?

Un dia, mientras escribia una carta, Otoko abrio el diccionario para consultar el ideograma 'pensar'. Al repasar los restantes significados (añorar, ser incapaz de olvidar, estar triste) sintio que el corazon se le encogia. Tuvo miedo de tocar el diccionario... Aun ahi estaba Oki. Innumerables palabras se lo recordaban. Vincular todo lo que veia y oia con su amor equivalia a estar viva. La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo.

The awful, ironic, glorious fix for the writing doldrums is to write the next page.

A novel in progress doesn't have a clear, forward process. It's messy, like a beloved, balky child.

The writer's special talent is to empathize with people and imagine their lives. We know them as we write them.

I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.

My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches' brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory...

And there was a tree stump outside the Black Barn everyone called 'Dave's stump' because for over three years, until a few weeks before our arrival, he'd sat on it to read and write, sometimes even when it was raining or cold.

In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers.

The muse is a fickle bitch. Woke me at five. You're

Some writers write to escape reality. Others write to understand it. But the best writers write in order to take possession of reality, and so transform it.

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels.

Sobre el escritorio se encontraba la máquina de escribir portátil, marca Underwood, que Woodrow Wilson utilizaba

A very good editor is almost a collaborator.

The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: 'T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.' To which the proper response is: 'But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can't.

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

Style in painting is the same as in writing,-a power over materials, whether words or colors.

Some books accrete things to themselves like a magnet. The writer risks sterility by subjecting the mysterious power of imagination to the devices of mere comprehension.

Were also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.