167 quotes found
“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”
“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”
“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”
“The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.”
“I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing Ill do is go write when those feelings are really, real...”
“Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.”
“Here's one prophecy the writer can make - you'll never be rich and you'll probably be poor.”
“I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably w...”
“Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes is to write anything original. And perhaps the eas...”
“Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincolns Melancholy I thought, Oh,...”
“The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.”
“The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.”
“Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.”
“Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, dont be demotivated”
“Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline”
“Don't be afraid to get off the internet, the answers aren't all there. You may have to ask a cop about the kickback from a shotgun, or how sweaty they get in summer wearing body armor. Or what colo...”
“Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing hu...”
“Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.”
“Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absol...”
“Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.”
