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The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
Sep 18, 2025
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.
The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Read, read read. Read everything.
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
As an actor, I know immediately if I'm saying a word that doesn't feel right coming out of my mouth, and I know how to change it. But as a director watching something, or even as a writer reading a script, sometimes it's not always clear what needs to be fixed.
Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
Once upon a time' lasts forever.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island...
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.
A great book should leave you with many experiences.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.