WRITING
"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." - Robert Cormier
"Writing
is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words." - Mark Twain
"My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip." - Elmore Leonard
"What's this business of being a writer? It's just putting one word after another." - Irving Thalberg
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." - W. Somerset Maugham
Rejection slip: "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." - Johnson
"There is probably no hell for authors
in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this." - Bovee
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." - Mark Twain
“The freelance
writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
—Robert A. Heinlein
"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" - E.M. Forster
“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
—William Carlos Williams
I'm
writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
Steven Wright
You fail only if you stop writing.
Ray Bradbury
In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop
writing.
Will Rogers
I'd
have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.
Paulo Coelho
Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene
Fowler
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov
The most important thing is to read as
much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
J.
K. Rowling
Television has raised writing to a new low.
Samuel
Goldwyn
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov
I
write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
Isaac Asimov
From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly
at any bad review.
Isaac Asimov
"Why do we take notes of meetings that last for hours and call them minutes?"
- David WilliamsRi
"Who put the alphabet in alphabetical order?" - Howard Nemerov
"The wastebasket is the writer's best friend." - Isaac Singer
"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes.
To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." - Richard North Patterson
"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy
method." - Walter Benjamin
"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word." - Dorothy Parker
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams
"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." - H. Jackson Brown
"Rewriting
is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush." - Pete Murphy
"I can't write five words but that I change seven." - Dorothy Parker
"The road to hell is paved with adverbs." - Stephen King
"The most valuable of talents is never
using two words when one will do." - Thomas Jefferson
"A snyonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." - Burt Bacharach
"I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out
how to eat while doing this." - Cormac McCarthy
"In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is." - Geoffrey Cotterell
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." - Anne Lamott
"I've never had writer's block. However, I've had publisher's block throughtout
my career." - Dary Maters
"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators." - Albert Camus
"Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have
won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world." - Tom Clancy
"I get a lot of letters from people. They say 'I want to be a writer. What should I do?' I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it."
- Ruth Rendell