SOME OF THE GREATEST QUOTES I’VE FOUND ON THE ART OF WRITING
Enjoy.
‘If you’re a writer, you’ll write no matter what.’ W.H. AUDEN
‘WRITE what you care about or it will come off wrong.’ ANONYMOUS
‘You’ll never get to be by just wanting to be published! Writing will help you. Publishing won’t do any of those things. All of the things you THINK Publishing will do for you is a myth’. STEPHEN KING
‘The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you’ll do yourself a service.’ STEPHEN SONDHEIM
‘Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new’. WILLIAM ZINSSER
“Write what interests you, makes you curious. Write what you understand but more importantly what you don’t understand or want to learn more about...” ANONYMOUS
‘I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.’ ANNE TYLER
‘If you have a good idea, get it out there. For every idea I’ve realized, I have ten I sat on for a decade till someone else did it first. Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever MAKE IT.’ JOSS WHEDON
‘It seemed to me that if I didn’t write, I would disappear.’ FREDERICK SEIDEL
‘You don’t get paid much to be a writer.’ ANONYMOUS
‘There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.’ MARY OLIVER
‘If you’re not creating you’re destroying’ ELIZABETH GILBERT
‘Success is discipline. DO the writing every day at the same time every morning’. STEVEN PRESSFIELD
‘People look at published writers and think they dive right in etc.typing fully formed passages as a court reporter. Not one of my writer friends sits down and writes elegant first drafts. Well, one woman did but we don’t like her much.’ ANNE LAMOTT
‘Remember to deal with perfectionism… Big sloppy imperfect messes have value. Be compassionate company to your writer self !! If you want to write you get to, but you won’t get very far if you don’t get over your perfectionism. If one of your deepest longings write, then write’. JULIA CAMERON
“When I write I Feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth’ KURT VONNEGUT
‘Write with everything you have, daily if possible for the rest of your life.’ CHRIS WINNFIELD
‘In dedication to your craft you will find solace, truth, and pride .’ STEPHEN KING
‘The dark side is rising..but the tradition of artists will continue no matter what ..Society needs us.’ ANNE LAMOTT
‘The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.’ NEIL GAIMAN
‘Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers’ CHARLES BUKOWSKI
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on’ LOUIS L’AMOUR
‘Ill write my way into another life’ ANN PATCHETT
‘Be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a litte’. HOLLY GERTH
‘The world is never the same once a good poem is added to it’. DYLAN THOMAS
‘Sometimes only paper will listen to you’. NATALIE GOLDBERG
‘The true alchemists do not change lead into gold: they change the world into words’. WILLIAM GASS
‘What’s real is that if you do your craft you will get better. Period. it is fantasy to think successful writers don’t have bored insignificant hours but they also feel a great sense of amazement that they get to write. ‘I’m grateful for good writing like I am grateful for the ocean.’ ANNE LAMOTT
‘ A writer has to have some kind of compulsive drive to do his work. If you don’t have it you’d better find another kind of work, because it’s the only compulsion that will drive you through the psychological righteousness of writing’. STEVEN PRESSFIELD
‘You have to have that feeling of ‘Ill show them’. If you don’t have it, don’t become a writer.It’s part of the animal, it’s primitive, but if you don’t want to rise above the crowd, forget it’. LEON URIS
‘I think that to write well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion: dislike, Displeasure, resentment, fault finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice — they all make fine fuel’. EDNA FERBE
‘I’m not a terribly good writer, but I’m a persistent editor’ MARK HADDON
‘3 RULES OF WRITING FOR MYSELF THAT ARE ABSOLUTES:
· Never ever take advice.
· Never show or discuss a work in progress
· Never answer a critic. RAYMOND CHANDLER
‘If it matters to you, you’re entitled to tell people, and that by telling them, ‘This is the way I see things’ you do a good and valuable deed’ UNKNOWN
‘If the result of something is that someone feels 10% less crazy because they see someone else thinking what they’re thinking, then I provide a service’ ALBERT BROOKS
‘Poetry. Arguably the least lucrative of the arts which artists enter ‘never for money, always for love’. DYLAN THOMAS
‘Your first draft is a map to buried treasure’. UNKNOWN
“The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged’. ANNIE DILLARD
‘A writer’s material is what he cares about’. JOHN GARDNER
‘Writing is a 2 step goal. First you find the gold, then you go back and polish it’ ERNEST HEMMINGWAY
‘Very few writers know what they are doing till they’ve done it. One writer says he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely…..’You can either type or kill yourself’ UNKOWN
‘PERFECTIONISM. It will keep you camped and insane your own life. It is based on the obsessive belief that if you just run carefully enough, hitting every step just right you won’t have to die. will ruin your writing. ..blocking your inventiveness and playfulness.’ JULIA CAMERON
‘If you want to write you get to, but you won’t get very far if you don’t get over your perfectionism.’ BRENE BROWN
“When I write I Feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth’. KURT VONNEGUT
‘Thinking about writing is not writing’ UNKNOWN
‘You begin (writing)not knowing where you will end up but trusting in your Imagination and the writing process to get you there’. ANNE LAMOTT
“Write about what you DON’T UNDERSTAND not what you DO understand.” STEPHEN KING
‘What if there were no such thing as a writer? What if there were no ‘being a writer’ to aspire to?”What if writing were simply about the ACT OF WRITING?’ JULIA CAMERON
“If we didn’t have to worry about being published or being judged, how many of us might just write?”What if we didn’t have to be ‘good at writing but we got to do it for sheer FUN? The bottom line, the fact is THE ACT OF WRITING MAKES YOU A WRITER” JULIA CAMERON
“Pick up your pen in the ink and begin at the edge of a cliff.” UNKNOWN
“If it fascinates you will probably fascinate others. But, even if it doesn’t, you will have devoted your life to what you love. An important corollary is that it’s no use trying to write like someone else. Discover what’s uniquely yours.’’ DIANE ACKERMAN
‘I think that to write well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, Displeasure, Resentment, fault finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice — they all make fine fuel’ EDNA FERBER
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