Quotes About Writing

Sure, writing has its moments of sublimity - grasping after the ineffable, realizing something just out of reach - yet at every instance modulated by the chronic substratum of shame about having taken a dump in public.

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.

Today, of course, popular culture is on a culinary binge; and so much personal writing is now devoted to gazing back upon the kitchen and the table that we've had to invent a new literary genre, the food memoir, to contain all of it.

Like most real writers, she was a stronger person in her books than in her life. But she had a constant urge to re-create the women of her childhood, the faith she had in their comforting omniscience.

plot, for Agatha, meant distillation of character.

You say that like I have a choice. These are the ideas that come to me. These are the ideas that have always come to me. If it can bleed me,eat me, or fuck me, I want to write about it. -L.K. on why she writes about sex and monsters in 'Flirt' Afterword

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day's life—'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back—

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all, so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all. The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

Kendi pay?ma, i?e yeni ba?lam?? biri olarak, bu konuda pek bir ?ey bilmiyorum - ama kan?mca, kitap yazmak, herkes ne derse desin, bir ?ark? m?r?ldanmaya benzer-bir kere ahengi tutturun yeter.

In writing, as in life, always be true to your character.

wats yr typ? people who can spell

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural.

This is the story of a girl who lost her voice and wrote herself a new one.

writing rage-poems by the sea pen, hands, claws stained with ink until the bottle runs dry and then I write in blood, spit, and fire lantern's light in the mirror scattering the dark

You were born with the seeds of your talent, the ability to observe the world around you and weave piece of it into a story. I believe that most—if not all—people are born with these seeds. What separates the writers from the non-writers is that the writers actually sit down and, you know… write.

I can't believe she gets paid for dreaming up crap like that.

Many writers, good writers who ought to know better, focus so tightly on the structure demanded by a crime story that they lose track of the fact that they are writing a novel. Accusations of both sensationalism and trivialisation are, alas, often justified.

there is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel.

Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader.

Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.

And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry—they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

While at SMLA, I wrote a science fiction short-short called "Make A Prison." It worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the S-F food chain, finally selling to Bob Lowndes at Original Science Fiction Stories for a half cent a word, then wound up in Judith Merril's prestigious annual anthology. I was elated—but I never wrote another piece of science fiction.

If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you're working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name's Carson McCullers it gets tricky. A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention.