Quotes About Writing

For a more detailed discussion of the subject, read Neal and Jana Hallford's Swords and Circuitry (Hallford and Hallford, 2001).

Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. I

Knavery?" Art3mis said after she'd finished reading it. "Were you using a thesaurus when you wrote this?

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

The first draft of anything is shit.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

Then he spoke of James Joyce. He told about Joyce's family, his religion, his education, his writing. He spoke of a book called Dubliners and a story in the book titled "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." Regardless of race, regardless of class, that story was universal, he said.