Writing Quotes

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

I learned to write by writing.

I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.

People say, 'What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?' I say, they don't really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.

Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

A man who is a genius and doesn't know it, probably isn't.

You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then... you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.

You only pass through this life once, you don't come back for an encore.

Never throw up on an editor.

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.

The desire to write grows with writing.

We writers have this saying 'Kill your darlings'... but I suppose you family men don't agree with it.

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.

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 don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

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.

It's always hard to wrap up a series. The longer I spend with the characters, the more they become like friends.

Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.

I have nothing but contempt for the deceitful thing men call 'happiness,' and find myself with no choice but to push my characters, whom I pour my heart and soul out to create, into the abyss of tragedy.