Writing Quotes for the new year….
Sometimes we all need a little inspiration … or something to distract us from our lack of it. So here are some quotes on writing I particularly liked.
- Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov
- Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer–and if so, why?
- – Bennett Cerf
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
- – Anton Chekhov
- Don’t explain why it works; explain how you use it.
- – Steven Brust
- I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
- – Peter de Vries
- Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with.
- – Nancy Ann Dibble
- Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
- – E. L. Doctorow
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, “All Trivia,” Afterthoughts, 1931
I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard
Explore posts in the same categories: publishingThis entry was posted on January 3, 2009 at 9:38 pm and is filed under publishing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: book, books, famous people, famous writers, quotes, sayings, writers, writing, writing quotes
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
January 4, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Maybe this is more pragmatic, but Grace Paley always gave this advice to people pursuing the life of a writer: “Keep a low overhead.”
-Loreen Niewenhuis
http://www.LoreenNiewenhuis.com