1,322 quotes found
“I've found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hou...”
“I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.”
“The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
“You must write as if each word is a precious drop of blood, or a tear to be saved in a glass phial.”
“Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.”
“There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.”
“If you dont make time for writing, writing wont make time for you.”
“Humor is so subjective, not everyone is going to get what you are peddling. Others will be offended when what you meant no offense whatsoever. Those are the stakes. You have to be able to stand up ...”
“Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, ...”
“Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.”
“A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to de...”
“People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, c...”
“I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to ...”
“The challenge of the writer is to transformartistically and imaginativelya unique personal experience into a universal, meaningful story.”
“It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowba...”
“And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance...”
“When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.”
“The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, ...”
“Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.”
“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called ...”
