Writing Quotes - Page 191

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.

Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.

Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words. ... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies."

I can't stand a sentence until it sounds right.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

Heck, I'm no Henry Mancini or Michel Legrand. I just play the guitar and write songs.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

Tis mean for empty praise of wit to write, As fopplings grin to show their teeth are white.

The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.

If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions.

If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down.