Quotes Tagged "writing"

Writing starts with living. —Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. (Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

And so I just kept writing to myself.

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

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

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

Everything I've written up to this point is crap. Now I'm going to write the real one

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.

Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai

I kill my loneliness by reading and (then) writing, damn.

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above all else, she didn't care what other people thought about her. But after a while, she started to take on a personality of her own, and I was suddenly more interested in her story than I was in mine.

That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure—the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

Silently I dance a dance of chaos to the rhythm of a dying sun