Writing Quotes - Page 153

Writing well means never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.'

A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink, and Paper, and without ever having had a thought of it before, resolves within himself he will write a Book; he has no Talent at Writing, but he wants fifty Guineas.

A man of moderate Understanding, thinks he writes divinely: A man of good Understanding, thinks he writes reasonably.

A picture can say 1000 words but it can also inspire you to write 1000 more.

I want to direct, write, produce... y'know, I love the entertainment industry

When it’s too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn’t going to, either. I always know that when I get a good night’s sleep, the next day I’m not going to get any work done. Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.

Dear Complete and Utter Stranger, The first thing that I have to say is that I hate oatmeal. I really hate it. And you know what? If you like oatmeal at all? I mean even the tiniest bit? I mean, say you were lost in the Himalayas, right, and you hadn't eaten anything except a Mars Bar for about seven years, right, and you're really cold and your fingers are all dropping off, right, and you look behind this rock, and there's this bowl of oatmeal? Say you would even think about eating the oatmeal? Well, JUST DON'T BOTHER WRITING TO ME, OKAY?

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

We'll keep writing and if it hits our standards we'll go with it. We're not here to destroy anything. It's as precious to us as it is for someone who's followed us for years.

Often turn the stile [correct with care], if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice. [Lat., Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus.]

I write when something sticks in my craw. Writing is a compulsion — or an itch.

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.

Don't confuse visibility with credibility.

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.