Quotes About Writing

friends who could write novel after novel as effortlessly as a politician could lie,

If I would have had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter.

not too many people would feel sorry for a man who worked from home, answered only to himself, and earned millions by simply typing words into a computer.

He had read a description of the life of a novelist, and decided his life wasn't too far different. Writing is easy, Gene Fowler had famously observed. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

played across her face. "It's like that famous quote, 'If I would have had more time, I'd have written you a shorter letter.

I composed balanced sentences and periodic sentences and practiced, till I was blue in the face, the English department adage, Vary your sentence structure. Amazingly enough, having a mix of long and short sentences, along with topic-body-conclusion paragraph structure, did not automatically make my prose interesting.

Their writing has the deliberately obstructive style ordinarily employed when someone either has nothing to say or needs to conceal the fact that what they are saying is not true.

A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks.

Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write.

You have to have that rare combination of thick skin and a tender heart. Most writers get it backward and have a tender skin and a thick heart... Every critic, however ill-informed, represents a point of view which is likely not limited to just him... Sometimes you will disagree with your critic, but you can always gain from him.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

Allusion is lovely, and experience with other forms of writing brings the ability to use that device pervasively. This in turn sets high expectations for the reader- in that you are expecting him to pick up on it- and this is a way of respecting your readers. And when you respect your readers, they will come to respect you.

One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.

This is where we get the absurd rule that one must never, ever, end a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill put it, "That's the sort of nonsense up with which we shall not put.

If your everyday conversation is sloppy and scattered, a highly disciplined writing voice will come off like some kind of schizophrenia.

The brain is more like a muscle and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot, then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase. Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.

The writer must know something about the world outside books—whether his or the books of the others. At the same time, he must also be thoroughly acquainted with the world inside books. Words on a page are part of real life. They cannot be substituted for the whole, but they cannot be taken from it either.

When you write a page and delete the whole thing, there is a sense in which it is not deleted. The better writer who remained behind is still there.

Justin Taylor, editor of Crossway, cites the example of one writer who wanted to thank "my parents, Jesus and Ayn Rand." See what happens when you leave out the serial comma? But Andy Le Peau, at InterVarsity, points to a different kind of example. Suppose someone were to dedicate his book to "my mother, Ayn Rand, and God"? Now the serial comma creates the idea that Ayn Rand is in apposition to mother, which it presumably wasn't.

We are badly diseased with regard to vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, and what we desperately need is for someone to write an elegant little volume of sane English usage that will make us all whole again.

I have wanted to "make books" since around the sixth grade, and I published my first book when I was in my late thirties. My point is that the time in between was not wasted—submarine service, marriage, college, bringing up three kids, starting a school for them, and so forth. This kind of life experience is not distracting you from your appointed task of writing. It is, rather, the roundabout blessing of giving you something to say.

Good writing is like a great cathedral. The echoes are lovely.

Sensory experience should not be draped on top of the story as sort of a last-minute decoration. Done right, it is woven into the fabric of the story, and as this happens, the reader is woven in, right alongside the description. In giving advice to writers, E. L. Doctorow once said that good writing should communicate more than the mere fact that it is raining. The reader should feel rained on. A