Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 8

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.

It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

Why the tag of ‘aspiring’ writer be the wishful cliché? It’s like a bumper sticker. Say it! I am a Writer. Period. We may all have a target and gradation toward successes, a personal illusion/perception. The quality or perseverance in one’s craft is your act. Flaws? Sure. Yet, you are a Writer, not a wannabe. Let go of the tags. Just write!

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.

What's my favorite part that I've written? That’s like asking me to choose which of my kids is least ugly!

Two characters and sexy banter do not a book make, damn it.

To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!

As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.

Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart.

Look back, but never look down.

A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

Whenever people ask me, "How are your books doing?" or, "How is your book doing?" I just say, "It's okay." I mean, what am I supposed to say? I'm a writer; that means I write because I need to write, because that's how I breathe and that's how I bleed. I'm not an author; I'm a writer. Even when I don't want to write; I can't stop! So, how are my books doing? The hell I know! The moment after I publish one book, I'm writing another one! I don't know how my books are doing! I just know that I'm writing them! I'm a writer, I'm a writer. I'm not an author.

So I went back in time and told her how I liked the smell of soil after the rain. It has a special place in my heart. It reminds me of my childhood days. Days spent in happiness and tranquility.

Life is truly lived only when we discover other faiths, festivals, languages and cultures.

My book sales are way down today. Also, I've received two scathing reviews. One of them calls me “a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

Write only if you wish to read it again and again...

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.

Writers are explorers who find new worlds and use words to bring them to our reality.

We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer.

A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

If one can, anyone can.If two can, you can, too!

There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books....My mind is a body that's a mind.

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents’ house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer.

Imagination is the real magic that exists in this world. Look inwards, to see outwards. And capture it in writing.

The closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time travels. The exact thing is true when completing a book.

Letters orchestrated into a song of words create the symphony of a novel.

Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present.

If you call yourself an "authoress" on your Facebook profile, you suck at life. You are stupid and your children are ugly. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to be cute and original. You're not. You are about as original as all those other witless twits "writing" the one millionth shitty Fifty Shades clone. Or maybe you're trying to show your 2000 fake Facebook "friends" that you are an empowered feminist who will not stand for sexist terminology. But you're not showing people that you are fighting the good fight, you're showing people that you are a sheep, who's trying just a little too hard to ride the current wave of idiotic political correctness. The word "author" is no more gender-discrimination than the word "person." Do you call yourself a personess? No, of course not, because then you might as well wear a sign around your neck that says, "Hello, I'm a retard.

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

Even great, best selling writers produce works that fall flat from expectations. This writing thing isn't easy and everything you produce won't be a best seller, but you must write anyway. You have to write because you love it, because it fuels you, because you can feel the stories living inside you, nudging you, prodding you, itching to get out and the only thing worse than writing it and failing is not writing it. As the late Maya Angelou once said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."Even if your work doesn't resonate with others, it is still worth writing. And that in itself, is what's important.

The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it.

How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?

Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Good editors are priceless.

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.

Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.

Becoming a writer does not mean words will suddenly flow with perfection from your pen. It takes hard work, rejection, and the willingness to lay everything inside you out for the world to see.

I wear the writer pants in the family.

I do not follow any tradition. I may stand at the beginning of one.

Writer. Another word for poor.

When the silence comes and the echoes of former life fades, what will have mattered will be, one made the world a bit better ‘fore their de-berthing. Writing, needs none, but the initial push of heart and passion, enabling the story to take flight, doves to clouds, clouds to doves, then to faithfully follow its unfolding through the quill transcribed, this self-perpetuating engine once born, with no further fuel required, to lift others in the journey, through time, for all time.

They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn't pay by the hour.

Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind’s dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind’s dungeons.

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.

He looked at the blue sky above and the green grass below and he knew he would always love this world!

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

I know not what it is about you that makes me go crazy but I do know that the radiance in your eyes is more dazzling than that in all the diamonds of this world!And that the inimitable fragrance of your skin is more sublime than that of all the perfumes of this world!

Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind.