Writing Quotes - Page 14

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.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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.

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

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.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

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.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

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.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.