Top On Writing Quotes

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone,...

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed...

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

Fruition-Think of writing as a harvest.You till the ground.Plant.Water.Wait.Apple trees take years to bear fruit.Harvest.Clean.Process.Then you have apple pie.

Writing on dark themes is not as easy as one might think; you have to live the worst and the most terrifying nightmares, again and again, till they consume you entirely and become an inseparable part...

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it'...

For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.

Never put off writing until you are better at it.