Top Writing Craft Quotes

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to f...

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when...

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.

Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing autho...

Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous...

Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar.

Any thing is interesting if you can communicate it. There are no unimportant subjects for the enlivened mind.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to fo...

It's the writing that teaches you.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good w...

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three

Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth...