Top On Writing Quotes

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be - and what one's own writing is not. Aldous Huxley

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning...

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each s...

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by w...

Either give it your all or don't even try!

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists...

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will lear...

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

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.