Writing Quotes - Page 324

Writing is thinking in slow motion.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.

There is no way to write unless you read, and read a lot.

Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.

Many who resort to crime ultimately can't read or write.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.

You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

I have Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to thank that a Russian writer can not only write anything he wants, but also publish it.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a characters predicament, but never to solve his problems.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.