Authors by Last Name
| Quotations about writing | |
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.
| |
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
I write to find out what I think, and what I found out writing The Colorado Kid was that maybe -- I say just maybe -- it's the beauty of the mystery that allows us to live sane as we pilot our fragile bodies through this demolition-derby world.
Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.
Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published.
The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. 
Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
To while away the idle hours, seated the livelong day before the ink slab, by jotting down without order or purpose whatever trifling thoughts pass through my mind, truly this is a queer and crazy thing to do!
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Too indolent to bear the toil of writing; I mean of writing well; I say nothing about quantity.
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. . . . It is far easier to write ten passably effective sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.
A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. 
I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing my-self and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers . . . if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. 
This is the difference between an ordinary scribe and a literary writer. The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. We can only follow them in wonder to observe and record the minute details of their lives like a voyeur.Top 100 Topics