Quote It Write

Quentin Crisp

2008-12-15T17:20:00.001-05:00

"There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think of what to do with the long winter evenings."

John Updike

2008-12-01T17:02:00.000-05:00

"A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.”

Jodi Picoult

2008-11-15T11:06:00.000-05:00

"Most people in America want an easy read. I call it McFiction - books which pass right through you without you even digesting them. I don't mean a book that has two-syllable words. I mean chapters you can read in a toilet break. Happy endings. We are more of a TV culture, and that is a hard thing to go up against for any writer."

Richard Russo

2008-11-01T17:34:00.000-04:00

"By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets."

Ernest Hemingway.

2008-10-15T17:58:00.000-04:00

"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused."

Jeanette Winterson

2008-10-01T17:42:00.000-04:00

"As a writer, you're always something of a vandal. You know, you're a tomb raider. You're gonna go in there and take the things that already exist - drag 'em out again, and dress them up differently. There is a sense in which, you know, you are a thief. You know, it's no wonder that writers are ruled by Mercury, god of thieves and liars, and Mercury of the double tongue. And so, there is the sense in which you will always steal, and take for yourself, the things that you need. But then you also bring them back into the light. You dust them down, and then you put them out again for people to find in a different way. I mean, the whole thing about myths, is that they need to stay fluid, they need to keep moving, and they need to be dynamic. And that's why we can go on retelling them, so that, what is valuable is passed on from generation to generation, across time, through cultures."

Hallie Burnett

2008-09-15T17:46:00.001-04:00

"Trollope said, 'On the last day of every month recorded, every person in a work of fiction should be a month older than on the first.' We go with our characters wherever they lead us, and as time makes its mark on us, so it must on them."

James J. Kirkpatrick

2008-09-01T17:28:00.003-04:00

"Good writers do no litter their sentences with adverbial garbage. They do not hold up signs reading 'laughter!' or 'applause!' The content of dialogue ought to suggest the mood."

Logan Pearsall Smith

2008-08-15T17:26:00.000-04:00

"Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other’s prose."

Amy Hempel

2008-08-01T17:25:00.000-04:00

"Are crop circles supernatural imprints, or the work of human hoaxers? In England, at least, folks have confessed to sneaking into fields to effect these transformations, but I was happier when they remained a mystery. I think writing is like swinging a scythe in the dark and finding in the morning, if you’re lucky and looking from the right angle, a mysterious, well-formed pattern has emerged."

Stephen King

2008-07-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

"How long you let the first draft of your book rest - sort of like bread dough between kneadings - is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks . If you've never done it before, you'll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It's yours, you'll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin perhaps. That is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is your own."

Edgar Allan Poe

2008-07-01T17:14:00.000-04:00

"There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man."

Wallace Stegner

2008-06-15T13:18:00.001-04:00

"How can anyone “teach” writing when he himself, as a writer, is never sure what he is doing?.... Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the un-experienced a few of the dos and don’ts of voyaging."

Christina Baldwin

2008-06-01T12:40:00.003-04:00

"Writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked. "

Vladimir Nabokov

2008-05-15T12:07:00.000-04:00

"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."

Somerset Maugham

2008-05-01T20:15:00.000-04:00

"All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences."

Carlos Fuentes

2008-04-15T17:20:00.000-04:00

"One wants to tell a story, like Scheherazade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges of mankind. It’s a way of stalling death."

Francois Mauriac

2008-04-01T18:29:00.000-04:00

"Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert, or like a pigeon let loose with a message in its claws, or like a bottle thrown into the sea. The point is: to be heard – even if by one single person."

Henry James

2008-03-15T12:45:00.002-04:00

Henry James set forth the principles on which to create a mystery: “So long as the events are veiled the imagination will run riot and depict all sorts of horrors, but as soon as the veil is lifted, all mystery disappears and with it the sense of terror.”

Kathleen Krull

2008-03-01T08:51:00.002-05:00

"Respect the genre you’re writing in. In an effort to put your own stamp on it, don’t ignore the established conventions of that genre – or you’ll alienate your core audience of loyal buyers."

Maxine Kumin

2008-02-16T21:05:00.002-05:00

"One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth."

John Gregory Dunne

2008-02-02T17:38:00.000-05:00

"Although it is not necessary for a writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt. A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct."

Vladimir Nabokov

2008-01-20T15:58:00.000-05:00

"That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves."

Norman Mailer

2008-01-10T20:31:00.000-05:00

"I’d never dream of not reading reviews. It’s like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window."

John Irving

2008-01-01T07:36:00.000-05:00

"I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros – but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the tickbird."

Rhys Alexander

2007-12-21T08:43:00.000-05:00

"Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors."

Beverly Lowry

2007-12-09T09:50:00.000-05:00

"The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in."

John Updike

2007-12-01T22:01:00.000-05:00

"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."

Harlan Ellison....

2007-11-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it."

Angus Wilson....

2007-11-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

"All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery - a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't."

P. G. Wodehouse....

2007-11-01T10:33:00.000-04:00

"Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."

John Gregory Dunne....

2007-10-24T16:55:00.000-04:00

"Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe."

Flannery O'Connor

2007-10-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

"I want to write like a child draws."

Gustave Flaubert....

2007-09-30T16:37:00.000-04:00

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

J.M. Synge....

2007-09-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

"When I was sitting writing 'The Shadow of the Glen' I got more aid than any learning would have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen." (Preface to The Playboy of the Western World)

Winston Churchill.....

2007-09-11T14:17:00.000-04:00

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public."

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

2007-09-02T15:01:00.000-04:00

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s first letter to Emily Dickinson asked her what reading she had done. When Dickinson replied that she had only heard bad things about Whitman, critic Higginson replied:

"It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote 'Leaves of Grass,' only that he did not burn it afterwards. A young writer must commonly plough in his first crop."

Grahame Greene....

2007-08-19T10:12:00.000-04:00

“When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye — which leaves it frozen.”

Umberto Eco....

2007-08-11T07:39:00.000-04:00

"The real hero is

always a hero by

mistake; he dreams

of being an honest

coward like

everybody else."

C. S. Lewis....

2007-08-01T10:21:00.000-04:00

"It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations."

Rod Serling...

2007-07-19T17:24:00.000-04:00

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."

James M. Cain....

2007-07-10T08:24:00.000-04:00

"I write of the wish that comes true - for some reason, a terrifying concept."

John Updike....

2007-07-01T09:56:00.000-04:00

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them and having them speak to him."

Stephen Leigh...

2007-06-19T16:43:00.000-04:00

"You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer."

This quote is dedicated to J. D. Rhoades

Eugene Ionesco...

2007-06-19T16:12:00.000-04:00

"A writer never has a vacation.

For a writer
life consists
of either writing
or thinking about writing."

This quote is dedicated to J. D. Rhoades.

Joan Didion...

2007-06-09T09:53:00.000-04:00

"Why had he forgotten to bring note cards that night? Had he not warned me when I forgot to my own notebook that 'the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write.'"

Joan Didion on her husband’s advice to always carry note cards. From "The Year of Magical Thinking."

John Gregory Dunne...

2007-06-01T09:44:00.000-04:00

"I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.”

William Mizner...

2007-05-02T21:02:00.000-04:00

"When you take stuff from one writer, it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research."

Robert Burton...

2007-05-02T20:46:00.000-04:00

"They lard

their lean books

with the fat

of others' works."

Ralph Waldo Emerson...

2007-05-02T20:27:00.000-04:00

"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients."

Archibald MacLeish...

2007-05-02T20:17:00.000-04:00

"A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off."

Jack Smith...

2007-05-02T20:03:00.000-04:00

"I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer."

Josh Billings...

2007-05-02T19:37:00.000-04:00

"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment."

Herman Melville...

2007-05-02T19:27:00.000-04:00

"But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

Marge Piercy...

2007-04-30T17:00:00.000-04:00

Writers are like crows; they carry off what is bright and shiny, without respect for its original use or intent.

Thornton Wilder...

2007-04-30T16:37:00.000-04:00

Everybody should eavesdrop once in a while. There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

John Le Carre...

2007-04-30T16:17:00.000-04:00

A spy,

like a writer,

lives outside the mainstream population.

He steals his experience

through bribes and reconstructs it.

Shannon Stacey...

2007-04-30T15:51:00.000-04:00

Fold it into a lovely and graceful Origami swan, and then step on its little head.

From "Thirteen things you can do with a printed copy of a negative review."

Gustave Flaubert...

2007-04-30T15:38:00.000-04:00

Writing is a dog's life,

but the only life

worth living.

Paul Kane...

2006-08-10T14:47:00.000-04:00

"As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end."

Flannery O'Connor...

2006-08-10T13:15:00.000-04:00

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

The Quran...

2006-08-10T12:35:00.000-04:00

"Of those who plot,
God is best."

Edgar Allan Poe...

2006-08-10T12:00:00.000-04:00

"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."

Vladimir Nabokov...

2006-08-10T11:55:00.000-04:00

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."

Herman Melville...

2006-08-05T11:57:00.000-04:00

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it."

John Updike...

2006-08-05T11:06:00.000-04:00

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head."

Richard Russo...

2006-08-05T10:48:00.000-04:00

"I have some ideas simmering, but I don't think it's such a bad thing to let them simmer for a while before I put pen to paper."

Jerzy Kosinski...

2006-08-02T17:13:00.000-04:00

"I don't fret over lost time-I can always use the situations in a novel."

Judy Delton...

2006-08-02T16:58:00.000-04:00

"A writer can no longer put all his eggs in one basket. If you write fiction, try nonfiction. If you can't sell a book, channel it into an article. A poem into a more salable essay. Be flexible. It's a leap to find out you can adjust, modify, diversify. It's exciting to explore a new genre and find out you can do it well. By taking a risk in another direction, you experience growth."

Alan Garner...

2006-08-02T16:50:00.000-04:00

"When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn't like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent."

Paul Kane...

2006-08-02T16:33:00.000-04:00

"As for my style, it's a hard one to pin down for them I suspect because I'm very chameleon-like when it comes to writing. I work in so many different styles depending on what I'm producing - for example the comedy style is totally different to the psychological one."

Neil Simon...

2006-08-02T14:54:00.000-04:00

"Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball."

H. L. Mencken...

2006-08-02T14:37:00.000-04:00

"I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk."

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)...

2006-08-02T14:03:00.000-04:00

"When you are describing,

A shape, or sound, or tint;

Don't state the matter plainly,

But put it in a hint;

And learn to look at all things,

With a sort of mental squint."

Frances Hodgson Burnett...

2006-08-02T13:12:00.000-04:00

"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."

Truman Capote...

2006-08-02T12:28:00.000-04:00

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

Julia Ward Howe...

2006-07-13T12:26:00.000-04:00

"The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness."

Henry David Thoreau...

2006-07-13T12:21:00.000-04:00

"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure."

Tracy Kidder...

2006-07-13T12:13:00.000-04:00

"What I was trying to suggest... was the intrigue that is always hidden in a scene, what a scene doesn't fully show."

Gustave Flaubert...

2006-07-13T10:50:00.000-04:00

"The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity."

Somerset Maugham...

2006-07-13T10:37:00.000-04:00

"The best style is the style you don't notice."

Karl Kraus...

2006-07-07T22:37:00.000-04:00

"My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin."

Anton Chekhov...

2006-07-07T22:34:00.000-04:00

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

Robert Southey...

2006-07-07T22:24:00.000-04:00

"It is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."

John Ray...

2006-07-07T22:07:00.000-04:00

"He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink."

Richard Wright...

2006-07-07T22:02:00.000-04:00

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all."

John Cheever...

2006-07-07T21:46:00.000-04:00

"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle."

Logan Pearsall Smith...

2006-07-07T11:18:00.000-04:00

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers."

Charles Peguy...

2006-07-07T11:09:00.000-04:00

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

Helen Keller...

2006-07-07T10:49:00.000-04:00

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."

John Steinbeck...

2006-07-07T10:43:00.000-04:00

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

Leonard Bishop...

2006-07-05T11:39:00.000-04:00

"Insights and perceptions pass through the mind like fleet fireflies. Lit for an instant, then gone back into the dark. They are precious, irreplaceable. Stop what you are writing and write them into a notebook, onto a napkin, a scrap of paper. ANYWHERE. They are more important than what you are writing now. What you are writing now is there. It is visible, tangible. You will not lose the mood, the flow, the roll."

From "Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction"

Morley Callaghan...

2006-07-05T11:33:00.000-04:00

"There is only one trait that marks the writer. She is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and she is born with it."

Jessamyn West...

2006-07-05T11:12:00.000-04:00

"There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft."

From "Saturday Review," 21 September 1957

Anne Perry...

2006-07-05T10:35:00.000-04:00

"You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why."

Nancy Ann Dibble...

2006-06-30T11:18:00.000-04:00

"Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with."

William Faulkner...

2006-06-30T11:03:00.000-04:00

"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."

F. Scott Fitzgerald...

2006-06-30T10:42:00.000-04:00

"Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created - nothing."

Tom Stoppard...

2006-06-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

"The hard part is getting to the top of page 1."

Gustave Flaubert...

2006-06-30T10:15:00.000-04:00

“It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough actually to father them.”

From a letter to Bouilhet about the dangers of planning a project too thoroughly.