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A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

Andre' Achman A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past, NYT, 8-28-2000

The greatest thing in style is to have command of metaphor.

Aristotle

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I’d type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov

Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.

W.H. Auden

Before you begin to write a sentence, imagine the scene you want to paint with your words. Imagine that you are the character and feel what the character feels. Smell what the character smells, and hear with that character’s ears. For an instant, before you begin to write, see and feel what you want the reader to see and feel.

Othello Bach

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Walter Bagehot

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Beryl Bainbridge

Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly… The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It’s about what happens when the stories are over

Charles Baxter - Writing Fiction

I began to see that about half the student's battle is learning basic skills, while the other half involves tapping into imagination, memory and a singular view of life and the world, a view no one else shares until you put it into words.

Annie Bernays - Pupils Glimpse an Idea, Teacher Gets a Gold Star, NYT, 2-38-2000.

You must be able to step inside your character's skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into. I can't remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: "No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."

Annie Bernays - Pupils Glimpse an Idea, Teacher Gets a Gold Star, NYT, 2-38-2000.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Geraldine Brooks, Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveler, NYT July 2, 2001

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

Sophy Burnham

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

Janet Burroway - Writing Fiction

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

Janet Burroway

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Lord Byron

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Truman Capote

It's immoral not to tell.

Albert Camus

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Truman Capote

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote

Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.

Jeffrey A. Carver

Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.

Jeffrey A. Carver

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Miguel de Cervantes

The moment a man begins to talk about technique, that's proof he is fresh out of ideas.

Raymond Chandler

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

Raymond Chandler

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

Anton Chekhov

Write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you are writing, and aren't writing particularly well.>

Agatha Christie

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Winston Churchill

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Winston Churchill

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

Cicero - Roman author, orator, & politician (106 BC - 43 BC)

Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.

Norman Cousins

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

Annie Dillard

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

Hart Crane, American Poet (1899-1932)

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

E. L. Doctorow - American author

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

E. L. Doctorow

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

John Dos Passos

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

Annie Dillard

The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.

Harlan Ellison

In good writing, words become one with things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

William Faulkner

Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. (Translation from French)

Gustave Flaubert 1881-1880

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse.

E.M. Forster - Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) "Anonymity: An Enquiry"

Writing is a difficult lonely endeavor, and every writer is a perpetual beginner. Therefore, don’t be ungenerous with another person’s attempts. Such an act will only reflect on you.

Isabella Franconati

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherazade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges of mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Carlos Fuentes

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

Carlos Fuentes

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others: Selected Essays

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Carlos Fuentes

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Robert Frost

Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

John Garnder

Out of the artist’s imagination, as out of nature’s inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another. The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to the net. This shimmering mess of loves and hates—fishing trips taken long ago with Uncle Ralph, a 1940 green Chevrolet, a war, a vague sense of what makes a novel, a symphony, a photograph—this is the clay the artist must shape into an object worthy of our attention; that is, our tears, our laughter, our thought.

John Gardner - On Moral Fiction

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Kahlil Gibran

The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.

Ellen Gilchrist - Falling Through Space, the Journals of Ellen Gilchrist.

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

Allen Ginsberg

If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Goethe

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power . . .

Louise Gluck

The best advice on writing I've ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.

David Guterson

I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.

David Guterson

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

Anthony Hope Hawkins

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."

Heidegger (from "Building Dwelling Thinking", 1951)

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.

Ernest Hemingway

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

Ernest Hemingway

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Ernest Hemingway

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway, Quoted in: A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

Ernest Hemingway

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absoutely disappear into the thought.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853) 1848.

Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Marble Faun (1860), Preface

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust.

Julian Huxley - "The Individual in the Animal Kingdom" (1912); quoted in From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences (1992) by Connie Barlow, Ch. 6 "Blurred Bounds of Individuality"

To write well, one must utterly abandon oneself to it. You cannot keep secrets or hold anything back. You must spill your heart out on paper.

Carla Iacovetti - http://www.carlaiacovetti.com/

Keep in mind that the person to write for is yourself. Tell the story that you most desperately want to read.

Susan Isaacs

I do think that the quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

James Ramon Jones

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.

Joseph Joubert

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson

"Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie."

Jocko - Quoted by Russell Banks in Time Can Transform the Fantasies of Youth, NYT, December 6, 1999.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Franz Kafka - Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

Tracy Kidder

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Stephen King

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Stephen King - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) - C.V. 15

The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. . . . Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers--common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.

Stephen King - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) - C.V. 36

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

Stephen King - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) - On Writing, 6

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling - Speech, quoted in The Times (February 15, 1923)

Like the combination of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon in the human body, craft features combine to form a sum greater than their parts—a sum that, in the end, cannot be divided.

Fred Leebron - CREATING FICTION: a Writer's Companion

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Doris Lessing

I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.

Gordon Lish

The novel can’t compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who’s had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.

Jack London




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