Browsing Topic Best Writing By Writers Quotes

Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

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

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.

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Those who write clearly have readers.

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you.

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

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

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.

How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here.

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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.

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven’t been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.