Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 10

When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish

Ink, a Drug.

If you are afraid of the critics you will never write a word

The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom.

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.

It is easy to find the problem. Knowing the difference between critique and criticism is the solution. Condition your rawhide for growth. (Either way).

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.

Save your work, you may never know when the light will go off.

Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

Things that only a writer would understand—you’re writing a character—you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry.

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

Art uses truth and beauty—both of which can be quite ugly, even as that ugliness is transcended—to foster change, growth, love, perception, friendship. Something that doesn’t do that can be great. But I wouldn’t call it art […]

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost all of us will produce a lot of really lousy stories before we start to get good. (Not all of us will choose to publish those lousy stories, but that's a whole separate discussion...)

Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.

Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.

I love the smell of coffee when I wake up in the morning. It gives me the awesome feeling of hope!

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

I meet people and they become chapters in my stories.

For the writer, madness should seep slowly out of them from the world they endure each day.

At times all you need is a bottle of fine old wine, a mellifluous piece of music playing in the background and a good book to spend the entire night in a magical bliss!

Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…

I live within my daydreams and nightmares; through that, I have learned to create, and I never cease from doing so.

Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.

The closest to my heart is not just one book - it’s the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, “Gods’ Food,” is already available in English.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far.""What stuff is that?" he'd asked her."We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city.

Rejection. Rejection. You can't handle rejection!

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.

You cannot write if you are not on fire

Makebelieve is a writer's best friend.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only author who intends to take the longest possible route to a destination that will always be over the next hill.

People speak even after their death. Only do speak those who have recorded their speech in writing before they die, the rest go silent forever

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?

The only difference between writers and people who don't write is that writers aren't afraid to display their demons.

Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.

Working on it.

Every book I've read appears in my writing.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

The proverb, "Where there's a will.." sums it up for a writer who had just started in his writing life; for himself, the fictional characters and the audience of his works. It's a trinity of perspectives; one of his struggle, another of the story character which he writes about and the last one of the reader's expectation of his protagonists.

You may follow the footstepsThe whole day will passWith you going around in circlesYet not reaching anywhere at last!

Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

You made a poet fall in love with the world.

Reading is sexy. Women who read are suspect. Women who write dangerous.