Quotes About Writing

And I will write this down / And then I will not be alone again

The function of the first draft is to help you figure out your story. The function of every draft after that is to figure out the most dramatic way to tell that story.

Sbaglio colossale come chi scrive nel risvolto che la poesia consiste nel pensare nella lingua...

then Tertullian is saying that several of the original New Testament books still existed in his day, well over a century after the time of their writing.

John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing.... No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his clockworks, his verbal descriptions failed to shine with the same light.... The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually unpunctuated, for twenty-five pages." Dava Sobel, Longitude, p66

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

The learned Paracelsus wrote that anything is poisonous in sufficient dosage.

L'écriture permettait d'accumuler les connaissances

tous les mondes ne suivent pas le même chemin, mais l'apparition du langage précède toujours l'âge des légendes. L'apparition de l'écriture marque sa fin. Wallie

Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar—flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music.

The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally "speculative writing," neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little "morals" at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories.

The Bible says in Habakkuk 2:2, "Write the vision and make it plain." The written goal is the breakfast of champions. You just can't do big things without making your goals specific, measurable, yours, with a time limit, and in writing.

As a novel, of course, the whole thing blows dead rodents somewhat more so than a dead-rodent blowing thing. What the hell do I know about writing novels? I have enough trouble dealing with all the shit that happens in real life. I

David A. Adler

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

His words were creating a bewildering maze of grammatically inappropriate junctures. It was the kind of maze where small, white mice died without ever finding the little lever.

Building a relationship with my readers is the very best thing about writing. I occasionally send newsletters with details on new releases, special offers and other bits of news relating to my Mystery novels. And if you sign up to the mailing list, I'll send you all

His book was a bestseller, and by the end of the year, he had signed a lucrative deal to write three more.

All writing is lies. Good writing is lies skillfully told.

In fact, studies show that less than 1 percent of Americans write down specific goals for themselves each year. That's a shame, because writing down your goals is powerful.

New Zealand HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited P.O.