1,322 quotes found
“Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”
“no one could ever push you to write or become a writer, except yourself.”
“It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”
“You will learn more about writing from one hour of reading than you will in six hours of writing.”
“I was thinking: to write and being a writer are two kind of diferrences things.To write is a please.Being a writer is about taking it as a job, as a consequency, as a responsibility. And being a wr...”
“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
“But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write ...”
“There is something about just setting the pen to paper that lifts me and helps to focus my energy and thoughts.”
“I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, ...”
“Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they...”
“we do not write as we want but as we can”
“Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a womans ankles became trumpe...”
“At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desper...”
“Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.”
“A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddl...”
“Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you're not writing well, why continue it? I just don't think this grinding away is u...”
“...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.”
“A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust”
“It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102”
“No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.”
