Writing
Quotes - Write the kind of story you would like to read
“Ordinary
life is pretty complex stuff.”
―
Harvey Pekar
“The
purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
―
Albert Camus
“If
you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool
that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of
your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them
wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the
next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff
books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you
a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness
and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it
make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you
be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a
world.”
―
Ray Bradbury
“What
an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with
flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one
glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead
for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and
silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of
human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens
of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that
humans are capable of working magic."
[Cosmos,
Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
―
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
“Everywhere
I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that
they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have
been prevented by a good teacher.”
―
Flannery O'Connor
“The
true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into
words.”
―
William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts
“Learn
the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
―
Pablo Picasso
“Write
the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of
advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one
else will like it either.”
―
Meg Cabot
“A
short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a
photograph; a novel is a film.”
―
Lorrie Moore
“If
you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing
in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
―
Anais Nin
“Cut
out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your
own joke.”
― F.
Scott Fitzgerald
“Make
up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us
what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell
us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch
that unravels fear's caul.”
―
Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993
“Words
do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different
immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
―
Hermann Hesse
“I
was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
―
Sharon Olds
“A
book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still
called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance
at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for
thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and
silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of
human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who
never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans
can work magic.”
―
Carl Sagan
“So
what? All writers are lunatics!”
―
Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
“A
little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only
real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
―
Stephen King
“By
now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this
book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend
you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that
someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his
books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the
suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...”
―
Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
