Writing Quotes - Page 9

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

I don't trust men everybody likes. Being nice isn't the same as being good.

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.

She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

A tamed woman will never leave her mark in the world.

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.