Writing Quotes - Read a thousand books, and your words
will flow like a river
“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is
like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but
you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're
going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along
the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up
there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have
not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the
Writer Within
“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should
be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite
society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can,
your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and
your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what
you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”
― Allen Ginsberg
“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which
the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people
who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into
reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional
Prose
“He asked, "What makes a man a writer?"
"Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper,
or jump off a bridge.”
― Charles Bukowski
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes,
will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2.
What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is
this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a
woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very
remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost
novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some
Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about
the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I
would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them,
was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who
have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
“The best time for planning a book is while you're
doing the dishes. ”
― Agatha Christie
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one
chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look
ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is
wine. Everybody drinks water.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook
“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt
that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem
is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and
attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
― kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical
Collage
“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to
write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was
I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends?
I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never
seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five.
"Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman
(meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I
had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as
possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to
surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over.
One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men,
when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating,
Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a
river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
“It's none of their business that you have to learn how
to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
― Ernest Hemingway
