1,322 quotes found
“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the h...”
“Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!”
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”
“Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. Its not just a question of how-to, you see; its also a question of how mu...”
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
“It is the tale, not he who tells it.”
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
“You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect t...”
“Good fiction creates its own reality.”
“Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”
“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into th...”
“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”
“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at y...”
“The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.”
“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”
