Writing/Writer Quotes

[James_Wilde]

Writing should carry a government health warning. It's highly addictive.

--James Wilde in "Prince on a Red Dragon"

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by MichelleLouring

“When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
― Neil Gaiman

Lol. So true.

[Nancy Fulda]

“You don’t write for the critics. And you don’t write for the public. You don’t write for the people who can buy hardback books. You write for a ten-year old kid in a public library somewhere in the middle west a hundred years from now.”

-John Updike as quoted by Connie Willis

(The internet was not able to confirm the quotation for me, but what the heck. It's awesome no matter whose brain it came out of.)

[kennyc]

"I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face; I saw courage and steadfastness. I saw faith shine in the eyes of those who trusted in what I could only think was an illusion and I saw the gallantry that made a man greet the prognosis of death with an ironic joke because he was too proud to let those about him see the terror of his soul."
- W. Somerset Maugham

[kennyc]

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
- Steve Jobs

[kennyc]

"I never went to college. If any sonofabitch could write he wouldn't have to teach writing in college."
- Ernest Hemingway from By-Line Ernest Hemingway

[orlok]

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality."
George Orwell - Why I Write

[kennyc]

"One thing I've noticed is that when you've had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, 'Not for us.'"

- Stephen King, Chapter 16 - On Writing

[kennyc]

"Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

- Stephen King from On Writing

[kennyc]

"I’m in the entertainment business. My function in life for the most part is to take people out of their lives and put them somewhere else."

- Tom Clancy (author of The Hunt for Red October etc.)

[kennyc]

"I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly."

- Edgar Rice Burroughs

[kennyc]

"Do not think, dream."
- Richard Bausch Letters to a Fiction Writer

[kennyc]

"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."
- Anaïs Nin

[NateStewart_TLA]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
- Steve Jobs

One of my favorites.

[JwkOKC]

"No man, unless he be a blockhead, writes, except for money" --Samuel Johnson

At least, attributed to Johnson by Prof. Walter S. Campbell ("Stanley Vestal"), founder of the professional writing courses at the University of Oklahoma, where Tony Hillerman among others got started. The list of graduates is long and great. Campbell died on Christmas Day of 1987 but the courses continue to this day and are still turning out excellent writers. They don't guarantee success, but they do instill a professional viewpoint. He told me back in 1949 that he didn't attempt to guarantee success (I never did learn to do acceptable fiction) but he could and would cut 10 years off of the apprenticeship most writers face. He was right!