“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
-Maya Angelou
“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.”
-J.D. Salinger
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
-Toni Morrison
“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.”
-Madeleine L’Engle
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
-Stephen King
“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.”
-Virginia Woolf
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
-Mark Twain
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
-Jack Kerouac
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”
-Lloyd Alexander
“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.”
-Sylvia Plath
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
-Saul Bellow
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
-Robert Frost
“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.”
-William Faulkner
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
-Mark Twain
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
-Ray Bradbury
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
-Oscar Wilde
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
-Stephen King
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
-Stephen King
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
-Stephen King
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
-Louis L’Amour
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
-Stephen King
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
-Philip Pullman
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
-Winston S. Churchill
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
-Henry David Thoreau
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
-Neil Gaiman
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
-W. Somerset Maugham
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
-Stephen King
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
-Thomas Mann
“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
-Stephen King
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
-Sylvia Plath
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
-William Wordsworth
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
-Neil Gaiman
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
-Vladimir Nabokov
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
-Neil Gaiman
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
-Margaret Atwood
“Tears are words that need to be written.”
-Paulo Coelho
“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
-Ray Bradbury
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ”
-Joss Whedon
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
-Virginia Woolf
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
-Philip José Farmer
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”
-Neil Gaiman
“To survive, you must tell stories.”
-Umberto Eco
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
-Jack London
“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
-Stephen King
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
-Isaac Asimov
“That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”
-Tim O’Brien
“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”
-Harvey Pekar
