Quotes About Writing

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. -

Explanations are such cheap poetry.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Stephen King

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story," he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.

I write for love, but love doesn't pay the bills.

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Upon being asked by a fan how to become a writer, Stephen King replied, Write.

I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.

Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.

A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's? If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one? Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the tools to write.