Writing Quotes - Page 50

One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?

I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.

I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.

Any room where you feel a good vibe is a good place to write.

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.

Writing isn't generally a lucrative source of income; only a few, exceptional writers reach the income levels associated with the best-sellers. Rather, most of us write because we can make a modest living, or even supplement our day jobs, doing something about which we feel passionately. Even at the worst of times, when nothing goes right, when the prose is clumsy and the ideas feel stale, at least we're doing something that we genuinely love. There's no other reason to work this hard, except that love.

I don't write for a living. I live to write.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.

Write for the right reasons - i.e. yourself.

Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in.

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.

If you can write it, I can be it.

I can't help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I'm not in the middle of some literary project, I'm utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down.

You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing.

I drink coffee. Without coffee, I probably couldnt write.

Don't write to sell, write to tell.

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

The only thing most people do better than anyone else is read their own handwriting.