(no subject)

[axeslade]

So, my favorite quotes from that site (and I know there's a lot). Some of these people I admire beyond all reason, some I gag at, some I don't know at all, but they at least said a few smart things.



There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. - Tennessee Williams

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world. - Tom Clancy

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you. - Henry Rollins

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. - William Sansom

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them. - Anne Tyler

Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something. - Isaac Asimov

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write. - William Goldman, from Which Lie Did I Tell?

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently. - Anna Quindlen, from The New York Times, Sept. 23, 2002

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a writer. - Harlan Ellison

All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it. - William Saroyan

Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell

The writer's way is rough and lonely and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say cleaning ferryboats? - Dorothy Parker

To me, writing is a horseback ride into heaven and hell and back. I am grateful if I can crawl back alive. - Thomas Sanchez

Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose not to write is a fool.... The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy. - Mary Lee Settle

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain. - Lord Byron

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. - Thomas Wolfe

I have written eleven books, but each time I think, "Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out." - Maya Angelou

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. - Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand

The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. - John Steinbeck

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. - Nadine Gordimer

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of. - Shirley Hazzard

A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God. - Anonymous

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean. - R. L. Stevenson

Being a writer means having homework for the rest of your life. - Lawrence Kasdan

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly. - Paul Rudnick

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that. - Pearl Buck

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. - Cormac McCarthy

When I am dead, I hope it may be said
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read. - Hilaire Belloc

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. - Robert Cormier

I have rewritten -- often several times -- every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers. - Vladimir Nabokov

Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush. - Pete Murphy

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over. - John Hersey

Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. - Oscar Wilde

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. - Oscar Wilde

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. - Michael Crichton

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you." - Saul Bellow

The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the "curiosity" level. - from the rejection slip for Diary of Anne Frank

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.... I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out. - Erica Jong

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it "to the editor who can appreciate my work" and it has simply come back stamped "not at this address." Just keep looking for the right address. - Barbara Kingsolver

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day. - Norman Mailer

The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write. - Gabriel Fielding

I have never seen a "normal" writer. - Edmund Bergler (twentieth-century psychoanalyst famous for defining and treating writer's block)

Writers get to treat their mental illnesses every day. - Kurt Vonnegut

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid. - Katherine Paterson

Writers aren't exactly people. Or if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. - Mark Twain

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting. - Pete Hamill

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. - William Saroyan

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none. - Jules Renard

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. - E. L. Doctorow

Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. - E. L. Doctorow

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book. - Gertrude Stein

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ... researching ... talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. - E. L. Doctorow

I don't have a sense of a so-called ideal reader and certainly not of a readership, that terrific entity. I write for the page. - Don DeLillo

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances. - John Steinbeck

I try to think of characters who on the surface of their actions are deeply unsympathetic. It's the writer's job to make them sympathetic, in spite of themselves. - John Irving, from an article in The Globe and Mail, July 13, 2004

When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color. - Anais Nin

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. - W. Somerset Maugham

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it. - Leo Rosten

In an odd way, writing is testament to my lack of imagination. I can't picture what another kind of life would look like. - Hari Kunzru

I write to write the voices out of my head. - Julie Anne Peters

I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die. - Isaac Asimov

I have always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry. - Emily Dickinson

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser

When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind. - Michel de Montaigne

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. - Charles De Secondat

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. - Groucho Marx

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. - Jerry Seinfeld

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx

A Texas town has banned the Harry Potter books because they glorify magic, and learning to read. - Craig Kilborn

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. - Dwight David Eisenhower

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. - Joseph Brodsky

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. - Sigmund Freud

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff. - Adlai E. Stevenson

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't. - William Faulkner

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. - Kurt Vonnegut

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs. - Christopher Hampton

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all. - Mark Twain

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic. - Jean Sibelius

A critic is a legless man who teaches running. - Anonymous

You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it's going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children. - Madeleine L'Engle

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are. - W. Somerset Maugham

Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book. - James J. Kilpatrick, from The Writers Art

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work. - Gustave Flaubert

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded. - Sidney Sheldon

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly

Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. - Catherine O'Hara

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. - Mark Twain

If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story. - Barbara Greene

Don't say the old lady screamed -- bring her on and let her scream. - Mark Twain

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

Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling as you had. - Ernest Hemingway, from By-Line

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. - Bernard Malamud

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. - Robert Frost, from the preface of Collected Poems

I would never write about anyone who is not at the end of his rope. - Stanley Elkin

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. - Samuel Johnson

The more a man writes, the more he can write. - William Hazlitt

By writing much, one learns to write well. - Robert Southey

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. - Jack London

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. - William Faulkner

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. - Hart Crane

Plot springs from character.... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me -- these characters -- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type. - Anne Lamott

If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. - Barry Lopez

You can't be afraid to deal with your demons. You've got to go there to be able to write. - Lucinda Williams

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. - Rainer Maria Rilke
The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from. - Gene Fowler

Comments

[bitexmarks.livejournal.com]

Woooooow, it's nice to know that other writers are eccentric, loopy, passionate, aching, as well. Thank you for sharing these, they are BEAUTIFUL! *blows kisses.*
bitexmarks

[spacequeen.livejournal.com]

Gah, these are great. I adore Henry Rollins, among others.