Quotes Tagged "writing-craft"

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

It's the writing that teaches you.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

Writing is easy. Writing well is hard work.

I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.