1,322 quotes found
“I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.”
“Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.”
“Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in ...”
“For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. I think its very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you...”
“I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own ...”
“One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.”
“The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been risi...”
“Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, vllig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.”
“No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching...”
“My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.”
“You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To ...”
“...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")”
“The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”
“Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.”
“You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”
“The historian records, but the novelist creates.”
“The hard part is putting one word after another.”
“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”
“If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Dont be shown up by a baboon”
“Writing starts with living.”
