Writing Quotes - Page 5

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

  Amy Bloom

  Liars, Good Writers

  Amy Bloom (2013). “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You”, p.86, Pan Macmillan

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• Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

  Geoff Dyer

  Regret, Desire, Fuel

  "Ten rules for writing fiction". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Disappointment, Philosophy

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.216, Penguin

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• I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

  Haruki Murakami

  Country, Humble, Thinking

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• When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Liars, Lying, Boys

  "TIME" Magazine, July 18, 1983.

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• Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on. I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week."

  Natalie Goldberg

  Jobs, Kids, People

  "Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights". Book by Jon Winokur, p. 48, 2010.

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• Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

  William Hazlitt

  Happiness, Teacher, Attitude

  William Hazlitt (1889). “William Hazlitt, Essayist and Critic: Selections from His Writings with a Memoir, Biographical and Critical”

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• For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

  William H. Gass

  Character, Stories, Epiphany

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• It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Life, Time, Butterfly

  Vita Sackville-West, Mary Ann Caws (2003). “Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings”, p.125, Palgrave Macmillan

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• When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Character, Glasses, Want Something

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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• It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

  Isaac Asimov

  Flower, Imagination, People

  Isaac Asimov (1987). “Past, Present, and Future”

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• I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Typewriters, Curse, Bits

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• Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

  Quintilian

  Wells

  Quintilian (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Quintilian (Illustrated)”, p.528, Delphi Classics

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• Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Made, Whole Life, Make Sense

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.139, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer.

  Rachel Bloom

  Sexy, Intelligent, Creating

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• I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

  John Steinbeck

  Prayer, Color, Water

  John Steinbeck (1990). “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters”, p.12, Penguin

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• And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

  Tennessee Williams

  Block, Artist, Together

  Tennessee Williams (1994). “Collected Stories”, p.274, New Directions Publishing

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• There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Four, Revision, Inspired

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• I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

  Toni Morrison

  Block, Students, Should

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.159, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

  Steven Pressfield

  Thinking, Editors, Metaphor

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

  Ernest Hemingway

  Time, Vision, Crafts

  Ernest Hemingway (1981). “Selected Letters, 1917-1961”

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• Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

  Elie Wiesel

  Inspirational, Ifs

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• 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.

  Jules Feiffer

  Past, Light, Battle

  Jules Feiffer (1978). “Ackroyd”, Avon Books

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• Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Sound, Looks, Weight

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Reading, Use

  Oscar Wilde (1950). “Essays”, Ayer Company Pub

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