Writing/ Writer's Quotes
Also, originally published to HerCorner.com when I was writing there.
"In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us." -Henry David Thoreau
"Not a single word or idea is too good to be deleted, changed, or improved." -Abby Goldsmith
"Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work." - Bette Davis
"I sit at a desk. I face the wall. If you sit facing the wall, the only way out is through the sentences." - E. L. Doctorow
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." - Francis Bacon
"Teach yourself to work in uncertainty." - Bernard Malamud
"Only those that risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Eliot
"In books lies the soul of the whole past time." - Thomas Carlyle
"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight." - Robertson Davies
"'Begin at the beginning', the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'" - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
"Ideas don't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"When we are writing, painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize." - Madeleine L'Engle
"Any man who will look into his heart and honestly write what he sees there will find plenty of readers." Edgar W. House.
"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there." Thomas Berger.
"I collect lines and snippets of things somebody might say - things I overhear, things I see in the newspaper, things I think up, dream up, wake up with in the middle of the night. I write a line down in my notebook. If I can get enough of those things, then characters begin to emerge." - Richard Ford
"Imagination is a divine gift." Madeleine L'Engle
"I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply. You don't use words that are not going to be employed in the narrative or context. It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself. By that, you put the reader right in there where the story is." -Theodore Sturgeon
"I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was." --Diane Wakoski
"I learned ... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness." --Brenda Ueland
"A 19th century Irish immigrant named O'Reilly called the newspaper 'a biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a day. It is a photograph, of 24 hours' length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year's newspapers which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written and we use them to light the fire.'" --Adair Lara
"The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything. It would be far easier (and nearly always more profitable) to become a real estate agent." --Maria Lenhart
"The kind of imagination I use in writing, when I try to lose control of consciousness, works very much like dreams. The subconscious takes over and it's fun... I do feel if ever I was looking for a source of material, all I would have to do is go back to my dreams." - Amy Tan
"When I write, I follow an image, a piece of music that can't get out of my mind. I let it lead me, like a clue to a mystery to be revealed." - E. L. Doctorow
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" - Vita Sackville-West
"I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is only valid when it is immediate and passionate; when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it." - Ray Bradbury
"Reading and weeping opens the door to one's heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one's soul." - M.K. Simmons
"When I'm stuck, I imagine my best friend in a tough situation. 'You've got to help me,' my friend (character) says. 'I can't get out of this without you.' 'Sorry, I'm just not in the mood,' is not an option. 'I'd rather scrub the kitchen floor,' is not an option. I have to help my friend. I probe, ask questions. How did you get where you are? Where would you like to be? What tools do you have to help you?" - Camille Minichino
"There is only one story of our lives and we tell it over and over again, in a thousand different disguises, whether we know it or not." - Pam Houston
"I'm an optimistic writer. I don't want to ignore the ills of the world; I want to offer workable alternatives to those ills. I want to remind people of the wonders that do exist, and those that might. "- Charles de Lint
"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work." - Stephen King
"Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered pot holder." - Raymond Chandler
"How comes it...that no man living is content with the lot that either his choice has given him, or chance has thrown in his way, but each has praise for those who follow other paths?" - Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus 65-8 B.C.
"Savor them in your mouth, try them on your typewriter." - Ray Bradbury
"A garden in the early stage is not a pleasant or compelling place: it's a lot of arduous, messy, noisome work -- digging up the hard ground, putting in the fertilizer, along with the seeds and seedlings. So with beginning a story or novel." -Ted Solotaroff
"The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit." - Fénelon
"Ring the bells that can still ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen
"Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us." - Oscar Wilde
"Life hasn't always smiled on me, but I have always smiled on life." - Raoul Dufy
"If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage." - Cynthia Ozick
"What's ahead of me and what's behind me are nothing compared to what's inside me." - Jean Shapiro
"The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein
"Anybody can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charlie Mingus
"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." - Henry David Thoreau
"Every person you meet - and everything you do in life - is an opportunity to learn something. That's important to all of us, but most of all to a writer because a writer can use anything." Tom Clancy
"The two best times to plant a tree are twenty years ago and tomorrow." - Chinese proverb
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony." - Gandhi
"If you wait until you're really sure, you'll never take off the training wheels." - Cynthia Copeland Lewis
"If you don't run, you won't trip but you may never get there." - Cynthia Copeland Lewis
"Jump right in or you may change your mind about swimming." - Cynthia Copeland Lewis
"In order to succeed, you must know what you are doing, like what you are doing, and believe in what you are doing." - Will Rogers
"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." - William James
"A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious." Walker Percy
"Appreciative words are the most powerful forces for good on Earth." - George W. Crane
"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits." - Thomas Edison
"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach
"The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious." - Theodore Levitt
"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost......" J.R.R. Tolkein
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin
"It is the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time." - Tallulah Bankhead
"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself.. ALOUD" -CoCo Chanel
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." - Daniel Hudson Burnham
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."
- Arthur C. Clarke
"That's what we all are - just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away." - Charles de Lint.
"I sit at a desk. I face the wall. If you sit facing the wall, the only way out is through the sentences. -E. L. Doctorow "
"Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize." - Elizabeth Harrison
"It takes time, trust, and courage for the pattern of a story of emerge in perfect (or imperfect) symmetry. Trust is the most important because a writer must let it happen and believe that, in time, in will." - Pamela Jane
"This is the way to get ideas: Never to let adverse circumstances discourage you, but to believe there is a way out of every difficulty, which may be found by earnest thought." - L. Frank Baum
"If I have ten minutes I use them even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive." - Rumer Godden.
"In prose the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them...when you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose not simply accept the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person." - George Orwell
"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." - Mark Twain
"A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not." - Henry Fielding
"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking." - John Maynard Keynes
"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." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"All the fun's in how you say a thing." - Robert Frost.
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie." - Stephen King
"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." - Orson Welles
"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." - Anonymous
"If you can get people to ask the wrong questions; they'll never find the right answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"The devil himself gets in my inkstand." - Nathanial Hawthorne
"Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed." - P.G. Wodehouse
"I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's greatest rewriters." - James A. Michener.
"In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have written, you have no idea what vigour it will give your style." - Sydney Smith
"Only a mediocre writer is always at his best." - Maugham
"There is no great writing, only great rewriting."- Justice Brandela
"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." - Robert Charles Benchley
"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money." - Moliere
"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other." Ann Landers
"A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Cicero
"If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau
"It is never too late to become what you might have been." - George Eliot
"The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that... women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves." - Louis Otto-Peters
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window." - Rudolph Erich Rascoe
"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The waste basket has evolved for a reason." - Margaret Atwood
"There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." - John Kenneth Galbraith
"I get a warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell." - William Stryon
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - Plutarch
"There's no magic formula. To become a competent writer, you write until you start to sound like you, and then you keep on writing. Finish things you start. Get better." - Neil Gaiman
"Real life doesn't have to make sense. Fiction does." - Janeen O'Kerry
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." - Calvin Coolidge
"Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads." - Erica Jong
"Writing takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve... and a lot of hard, hard work." - Georgia 0' Keefe
"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say." - Sholem Asch
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage isalso what it takes to sit down and listen." - Winston Churchill
"A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream." - Gaston Bachelard
"The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it." - Jacques Prévert
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau
"An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward." - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers." - Logan Pearsall Smith
"Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: What more could you ask of life?" - Charles Lindbergh
"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators." - Albert Camus
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain
"To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart." - Donald Laird
"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going." - Unknown
"Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things." - Frank A. Clark
"Nature...moves the heart, appeals to the mind, and fires the imagination - health to the body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul." - John Burroughs
"Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself." - Henry James
"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
"A painting is never finished, it simply stops in interesting places." - Paul Gardner
Some contend, in poetry, that the mind is dangerous and should be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and should be left in. - Robert Frost
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. - Sylvia Plath
"A goal is a dream with a deadline." - Leo B. Helzel
"Adventure is worthwhile in itself." - Amelia Earhart
"All sorrows can be borne if you tell a story about them." - Karen Blixen
"Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. those days are over." - Bella Abzug
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is. - Jack Lemmon
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. - Sharon O'Brien
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers. - Logan Pearsall Smith
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. - Ernest Hemingway
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. - Jack London
It is easy enough to be pleasant, When life flows by like a song. But the man worth while is the one who can smile, when everything goes dead wrong. - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing - Helen Keller
It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop - Confucius
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something. - Ornette Coleman
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. - John Powell
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door. - Emily Dickinson
