Quotes About Writing

No point writing when the spirit doth not lead.

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers 'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn. I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus. O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

I'm with you in Rockland, where we are great writers on this same dreadful typewriter.

Ugyanis írogatok olykor egy-egy elbeszélést. - Olykor elolvasok egyet-egyet. - Köszönöm. - Elbeszéléseket általában, nem az önét.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.

The devil had not only acquired a monopoly of the good music and the good fun, but has of late acquired a controlling interest in the good writing.

NOVEL, n. A short story padded

He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!

In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply ... many 'awful examples'...

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

Called to be a writer, but not a minister, Twain depicted his work as an author in theological terms, humorously describing himself as preacher, prophet, and even saint. Twain's work frequently reminds one of the Menippean satirist, who drew on traditional genres for their burlesques and "ostensibly improvised sermons," as Gilbert Highest notes, even while developing their own views in response to their opponents.

If you're honest with yourself as a writer, trying to tell the best story you can, your story will be an honest one. And your values will come out, no matter how hard you try to disguise them.

One man wrote War and Peace. Thirty-five screenwriters wrote The Flintstones.

John Correli: Did you kill Mr Boz, Miss Tramell? Catherine: I'd have to be pretty stupid to write a book about killing and then kill him the way I described in my book. I'd be announcing myself as the killer. I'm not stupid.

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Bad books on writing tell you to 'write what you know', a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it's always been easier to make new lives than new wealth.

Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight – or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won't follow an outline.

I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.

If you Google "How do I write a book?" you'll get a million hits, but here's the dirty secret: It's just math. It's not even hard math—it's first-grade addition. Write three pages a day, every day. In a hundred days, you'll have three hundred pages. Type "The End." Done.

Finish the book. Finish the book, regardless of how bad it is. You can make it better in a rewrite.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Lawrence Block called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit