Writing Quotes

" What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers."
-- Logan Pearsal Smith

"Each man has his own way. After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in. You're working, your mind is working, on this problem in the back of your head ... What's an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the cosmos; . . . why do ideas, why do great scientific discoveries often occur in different parts of the world at the same time? The same is true of the elements that go to make up a poem or a great novel or any work of art. They are already in the air, they have not been given voice, that's all. They need the man, the interpreter, to bring them forth.
--Henry Miller

"I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend- to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit. " --E.B. White

"Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right."
--Marian Wright Edelman

"I keep a small sheath of 3 X 5 cards in my billfold. If I think a good sentence, I'll write it down . . . Occasionally, there's one that sings so perfectly the first time that it stays, like "My boy has stopped speak in me and I don't think I can bear it." I wrote that down on a 3 X 5 card, perhaps on a bus, or after walking the dog." --Joseph Heller

"I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I do not know why-or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had-stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done." --Katherine Anne Porter

"My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing." --Tennessee Williams

"To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness." --Allen Ginsberg

"Whatever fascinates me or at least holds my attention-whether a dream, an incident, an idea, an anecdote, an overheard conversation, a quote-I write in my journal. These are the kernels for my stories, though I'm not saying that everything I write down needs to appear in a story-or should. I also use my journal, as in "Independence Boulevard," later in the process, for research on the story, if it's needed, or for blocking out scenes or character sketches." -- Robin Henley

"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place it leads."
-- Erica Jong

"A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it."
--Ernest Hemingway

"If you write a hundred short stories and they're all bad, that doesn't mean you've failed. You fail only if you stop writing." --Ray Bradbury

"All writers are observers, fascinated with human goings-on but journal writers are a special breed, I think, suspicious of their own memories, like tourists taking snapshots of everything they see. They're different from diarists, of course-diarists seem, as a whole, fascinated with their own lives-journal-keepers are snoops, fascinated with everyone else's life." --Robin Hemley

"My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it. I think your hand concentrates for you. I don't know why it should be so." -- Rebecca West

"When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through." --Ernest Hemingway

"When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life." --Erica Jong

"Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right." --Marian Wright Edelman

"If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried." --Susan Ohanian

"In the evening my griefs come to me one by one." --Linda Pastan

"We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand." --Jennie Jerome Churchill

"Dreams are . . . illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you." --Marsha Norman

"Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams." Anzia Yezierska

"Ecstasy cannot be constant, or it would kill." --Eleanor Farjeon

"I always do the first line well, but I have trouble with all the others." --Moliere

"All the fun is in how you say a thing. " --Robert Frost

"A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so." --Anatole France

"If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me." --Shakespeare

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." --Elmore Leonard

"What are significant details and how should you describe them? A significant detail is something that has push or is a symbol of push. By push I mean possessing a force that drives a person. . . . Where you are born pushes you. To be born in Johannesburg will make you a different person than if you are born in Brooklyn. To be born in 1945 is to be different than to be born in 1975. Class, race, time, and place. gender, parentage, education. The weather, your insulation from the weather, your economic condition, your equipment, your car and your clothes, the food you eat, where and how you eat it. Moments of embarrassment, hope of praise, the level of activity in your glands, what you think beauty is, and what brings esteem among your people. These are forces that move a person in a certain direction. Vectors. They can be drawn on a blackboard. Force creates motion. Motion is action. Out of actions come drama." --Larry Reinhart, How to Write A Mystery

"Young readers often think of description as the parts that they can skip. Naive as that may be, that impulse recognizes something crucial-- the parts where the colors of the arroyo or the burnished glow of the furniture are described do not seem quite as . . . . But the creation of the physical world is as crucial to your story as action and dialogue. If your readers can be made to see the glove without fingers or the crumpled yellow tissue, the scene becomes vivid. Readers become present. Touch, sound, taste, and smell make reader feel as if their own fingers are pressing the sticky windowsill. . . . Whatever you're describing, readers need a clear visual image. However, too much visual information is confusing. The mind loses track easily. A brown Naugahyde chair with a long gash in its seat can establish an interior. Big nostrils can make a person. Give one vivid detail, and readers will build the rest." --Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction

"So here's what you do: take your memories and present them to the reader. Take your passions. You take as much guilt and as little total depravity as you can safely mix in. You read. You steal. You want desperately to be a writer. You volunteer to nail your soft parts to a tree. You soak up everything. You take notes. You retire to your garret or your study or your office and you tie yourself to the chair with the belt of your bathrobe. And you write. You slowly go crazy, but you write. You drink lye, if that is what it will take, and you remember the nights and caves in Granada. Because you desperately want to be a writer. You do. You write. You write. And you write." --Bill Brashler, The Total Writer

E.B. White describes Will Strunk of Elements of Style fame: From every line there peers out at me the puckish faces of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro in a carefully edged mustache. "Omit needless words!" cries the author on page 17, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, "Rule Thirteen. Omit needless Words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!" He was a memorable man, friendly and fun. Under the remember sting of his kindly lash, I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919.

"I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend-to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit. " --E.B. White

"Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail." --Hemingway

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