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ostarellaJust because it was a very slow holiday weekend - just me and my brother, so no candy or egg hunting ;-) , I was doing some skimming around the net for quotes by and for writers and grabbed a few that I liked. Some of the best ones I've got on cards taped here and there around my workspace :D
"A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments." - Joyce Cary
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann
"Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced." - Leo Tolstoy
“A year from now you'll wish you had started today.” - Karen Lamb
"Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer." - John O'Hara
"Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues—which takes years." - Alex Haley
"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." - Barbara Kingsolver
"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." - C.S. Lewis
"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." - Oscar Wilde
“Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.” - Napolean Hill
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” - Virginia Woolf
"For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity." - George Orwell
"God sells us all things at the price of labor." - Leonardo da Vinci
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear." - Ezra Pound
"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." - E. L. Doctorow
"Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment." - Baltasar Gracian
"He is able who thinks he is able." - Buddha
"However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
“He who Works with his Hands, is a Laborer. He who Works with his Hands and his Head is a Craftsman. He who Works with his Hands, his Head, and his Heart is an Artist.” - Seneca
"I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat." - Robertson Davies
"I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell." - Louis L'Amour
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard
"I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there." - H.G. Wells
"If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit." - Stephen King
"If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies." - Allan W. Eckert
"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young." - W. Somerset Maugham
“I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.” - James A. Michener
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” - Anton Chekhov
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” - George Eliot
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” - Seneca
“It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.” - Harlan Ellison
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." - Mark Twain
"Never save anything for your next book, because that possible creation may not be properly shaped to hold the thoughts you're working with today. In fiction especially, anything that could happen, should happen." - Tam Mossman
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost
"No, it's not a very good story—its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside." - Stephen King
"Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge." - H.G. Wells
“No one understands a writer like another writer.” - Unknown
"Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse." - Marianne Williamson
"Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a criterion for your own writing. And then trust it—and yourself." - Rosemary Daniell
"Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window." - William Faulkner
"Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while." - David Eddings
"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." - William Shakespeare
"The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the word instead of being pulled by them." - Raymond Chandler
"The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story—and then your story!" - Ford Madox Ford
"The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events." - Ray Bradbury
"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea." - Thomas Mann
"There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be." - Doris Lessing
"There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an art." - Lawrence Watt-Evans
"To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose." - Eudora Welty
"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." - Claude M. Bristol
"To write simply is as difficult as to be good." - Somerset Maugham
“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.” - Jessamyn West
“The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say.” - Anais Nin
“The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.” - William Faulkner
“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
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." - Kurt Vonnegut
"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy." - Kahlil Gibran
"Write about it by day, and dream about it by night." - E. B. White
"Write what you care about and understand. Writers should never try to outguess the marketplace in search of a salable idea; the simple truth is that all good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that people like you will enjoy." - Richard North Patterson
"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." - E. L. Doctorow
"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it." - David Sedaris
"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." - Gene Fowler
“Writing loves US. Did you know that? I didn't! Writing wants to be written. First, though we must be willing to LISTEN. We do not control the writing--the writing controls us. It moves us, frees us, becomes us. We have to be ready to hand the reigns over to it, though. Our job is to PAY ATTENTION and write what we HEAR. ARE YOU LISTENING?” - Hope Wilbanks
"You ask for the distinction between 'Editor' and 'Publisher': an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors." - Max Schuster
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like." - Phyllis A. Whitney
"A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments." - Joyce Cary
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann
"Art is not a handicraft. It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced." - Leo Tolstoy
“A year from now you'll wish you had started today.” - Karen Lamb
"Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer." - John O'Hara
"Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues—which takes years." - Alex Haley
"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." - Barbara Kingsolver
"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." - C.S. Lewis
"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." - Oscar Wilde
“Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.” - Napolean Hill
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” - Virginia Woolf
"For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity." - George Orwell
"God sells us all things at the price of labor." - Leonardo da Vinci
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear." - Ezra Pound
"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." - E. L. Doctorow
"Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment." - Baltasar Gracian
"He is able who thinks he is able." - Buddha
"However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
“He who Works with his Hands, is a Laborer. He who Works with his Hands and his Head is a Craftsman. He who Works with his Hands, his Head, and his Heart is an Artist.” - Seneca
"I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat." - Robertson Davies
"I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell." - Louis L'Amour
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard
"I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there." - H.G. Wells
"If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit." - Stephen King
"If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies." - Allan W. Eckert
"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young." - W. Somerset Maugham
“I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.” - James A. Michener
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” - Anton Chekhov
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” - George Eliot
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” - Seneca
“It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.” - Harlan Ellison
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." - Mark Twain
"Never save anything for your next book, because that possible creation may not be properly shaped to hold the thoughts you're working with today. In fiction especially, anything that could happen, should happen." - Tam Mossman
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." - Robert Frost
"No, it's not a very good story—its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside." - Stephen King
"Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge." - H.G. Wells
“No one understands a writer like another writer.” - Unknown
"Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse." - Marianne Williamson
"Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a criterion for your own writing. And then trust it—and yourself." - Rosemary Daniell
"Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the most. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window." - William Faulkner
"Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while." - David Eddings
"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." - William Shakespeare
"The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the word instead of being pulled by them." - Raymond Chandler
"The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story—and then your story!" - Ford Madox Ford
"The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his sense, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events." - Ray Bradbury
"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea." - Thomas Mann
"There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be." - Doris Lessing
"There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an art." - Lawrence Watt-Evans
"To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose." - Eudora Welty
"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." - Claude M. Bristol
"To write simply is as difficult as to be good." - Somerset Maugham
“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.” - Jessamyn West
“The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say.” - Anais Nin
“The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.” - William Faulkner
“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
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." - Kurt Vonnegut
"Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy." - Kahlil Gibran
"Write about it by day, and dream about it by night." - E. B. White
"Write what you care about and understand. Writers should never try to outguess the marketplace in search of a salable idea; the simple truth is that all good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that people like you will enjoy." - Richard North Patterson
"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." - E. L. Doctorow
"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it." - David Sedaris
"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." - Gene Fowler
“Writing loves US. Did you know that? I didn't! Writing wants to be written. First, though we must be willing to LISTEN. We do not control the writing--the writing controls us. It moves us, frees us, becomes us. We have to be ready to hand the reigns over to it, though. Our job is to PAY ATTENTION and write what we HEAR. ARE YOU LISTENING?” - Hope Wilbanks
"You ask for the distinction between 'Editor' and 'Publisher': an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors." - Max Schuster
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like." - Phyllis A. Whitney
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 10:32 pm (UTC)I was only looking for a couple, just to get my own juices running - and I became obsessed :p I do that a lot... LOL
no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 11:34 pm (UTC)I likes the last one by Phyllis Whitney. I also like the one by Alex Haley about beginning writers.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 10:22 am (UTC)