Quotes About Writing

Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

Good writing isn't a science. It's an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.

When I write my books, actually I'm known for very logical rule-based magic systems. I write with one foot in fantasy and one foot in science fiction.

When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.

There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.

If you don't take enough math classes or science classes or writing intensive classes, you're not going to be prepared to compete in college or the workplace -- no matter what your diploma says.

When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Mathematicians do not write for the circulating library.

O MY WIFE-who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity.

Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.

When I was 19 years old, I wrote my first book. I took a computer science class, and the book was garbage. I thought I could write a better one, so I did.

I write for the beauty of the printed word"from PREFACE to BIPOLAR BUFFALO

I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?

When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

Bev Pettersen writes with flair and a down-to-earth warmth that will make you smile and sigh with contentment.