Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. - Virginia Woolf
There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas, of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence--an overwhelming determination to succeed. - Sophy Burnham
Peter Abelard: Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, for it is a dangerous and a contagious disease.
A novel is like getting on a train to Louisiana. All you know at the moment is that you're getting on the train, and you're going to Louisiana. But you don't know who you're going to sit behind, or in front of, or beside; you don't know what the weather is going to be when you pass through certain areas of the country; you don't know what's going to happen South; you don't know all these things, but you know you're going to Louisiana. - Ernest J. Gaines
A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing. - Bill Barich
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space. — Joyce Carol Oates
We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images--a dog hunting through garbage cans, a plane circling above Alaskan mountains, an old lady furtively licking her napkin at a party. - John Gardner
Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! They say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation mark simply emphasizes its banality! - Lewis Thomas, "On Punctuation," from The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Writers always go back to their young days, to their young lives. If a writer writes about his life, and he is serious, he will go back there, just like a criminal goes back to the place of his crime. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself....Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. - Mark Twain
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist: “More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.”
"You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by." – Mark Twain
If you don't allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good. - Steven Galloway
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible. - Mark Twain
There shouldn't be difficult moments. As soon as things get difficult, I turn on my heel and let the damned idea percolate on its own. I pretend to abandon it! It soon follows and comes to heel. You can't push or pressure ideas. You can't try, ever! You can only do. Doing is everything. - Ray Bradbury
If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author. - Neil Gaiman
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mould, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, figures of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth that I must try to reach and realize. - Dylan Thomas
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. - Philip Roth
Not long after I moved to Los Angeles from New York City, I attended a cocktail party with my actor-husband. At the party, which was full of film and TV industry representatives, a man asked me what I did for a living. I told him that I was a writer. “Right,” he said. “Half-hour or hour?” I smiled indulgently. “Neither,” I said, fixing him with what I like to think of as an Oversoul gaze. “Lifetime.” He smiled back. “Oh, you work for cable,” he said. - Carol Muske-Dukes
The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work. - Janet Frame
