1,322 quotes found
“...writing is not a performance but a generosity.”
“Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.”
“Do not, therefore, say "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others.”
“But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. Its a slow proc...”
“If the voices in your head make you cry, you're a lunatic. Put their words on paper, and you're a writer.”
“I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.”
“I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not...”
“Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. ”
“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. ”
“As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousan...”
“For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.”
“Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, its everything.”
“There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.”
“1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.)4. Write with honest emotion5. Be careful of being facile6. Be war...”
“You know youre writing well when youre throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.”
“To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make”
“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.”
“You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, ...”
“Dont ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out”
“Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
