John Gardner - One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel.
Samuel Johnson - The greatest part of a writer´s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
William Blake - Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Virginia Woolf - It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
James A. Michener - I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's greatest rewriters.
Olivia Goldsmith - As difficult as it is for a writer to find a publisher--admittedly a daunting task--it is twice as difficult for a publisher to sort through the chaff, select the wheat, and profitably publish a worthy list.
Gabriel Fielding - The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
Barbara Greene - If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story.
Philip Dusenberry - I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes...
Jack London - You can't sit around and wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Laurie Halse Anderson - Whenever life hands you trauma, stick it in a book.
E.L. Konigsburg - Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don't talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.
Paul O'Neil - Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, sink your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tag line.
Stendhal - A novel is a mirror walking along the main road.
Leo Tolstoy - A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
John Irving - Half my life is an act of revision.
Georges Simenon - Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
Emily Dickinson - Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man.
Saul Bellow - I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
Edgar Allan Poe - Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.
Ernest Hemingway - All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all 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.
Samuel Johnson - The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
John Irving - The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
William Faulkner - Read, read, read. Read everything- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write.
Dean Koontz - Writers who love their own work too much and too soon are usually not very good.
Margaret Atwood - If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.
Richard Peck - We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.
Charles de Montesquieu - An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
William Wordsworth - Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart...
Robert Schuller - Success is spelled W - O - R - K.
Robert Southey - By writing much, one learns to write well.
Kurt Vonnegut - Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Richard Bach - A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Louise Brooks - Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.
J. P. Donleavy - Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
George Bernard Shaw - The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
Mark Twain - The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Anton Chekhov - Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Joan Didion - Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
William Makepeace Thackeray - There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.
Edna Ferber - Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
Ray Bradbury - You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Leo Tolstoy - Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
Joseph Heller - Every writer I know has trouble writing.
I loved these. Chekhov's example of showing vs telling is fantastic!
ReplyDeleteMe too. Chekhov's quote is one of my favorites. :)
Delete