“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle
“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
― Maya Angelou
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations
2,523 people liked it
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“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow
tags: imagination , inspiration , writing
1,913 people liked it
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“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
tags: books , morality , reading , writing
1,877 people liked it
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“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
tags: anais-nin , qoutes-on-writing , writing
1,876 people liked it
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“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath
tags: writing
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“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King
“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons
“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle
“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
― Maya Angelou
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gra
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King
“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons
“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov
“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing
“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King
“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
-Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898”
― Mark Twain
-Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898”
― Mark Twain
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”
― Joss Whedon
“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours
“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James A. Michener
“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis
“A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anaïs Nin
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck
“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway
― Neil Gaiman
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”
― Joss Whedon
“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours
“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James A. Michener
“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis
“A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anaïs Nin
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck
“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway
