Wisdom Lines Hub

  Writing Quotes - If a story is in you, it has to come out   “I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut   “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche   “Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.” ― John Waters   “If a story is in you, it has to come out.” ― William Faulkner   “When you're missing a peice of yourself, achin...

  Writing Quotes - If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad   “She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on.” ― robert m drake   “Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” ― Brenda Ueland   “I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.” ― Philip Pullman   “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson   “nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.” ― Charles Bukowski   “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit wil...

  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 o...

  Writing Quotes - Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted   “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin   “The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays   “Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it wh...

  Writing Quotes - One should use common words to say uncommon things   “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft   “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."   (Letter 16, 1657)” ― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters   “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.” ― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim   “In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” ― Rose Tremain   “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."   [The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]” ― Cyril Connolly   “When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely w...