Writing Quotes - page 19

As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda. (Martin Amis)
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. View quote
Harlan Ellison
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. View quote
Vernor Vinge
The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can. View quote
John Dos Passos
There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself. View quote
John Dos Passos
Any suggestion that I'm writing about political operatives because I'm interested in political operatives misses the entire point. View quote
Bob Woodward
When I started writing I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way. View quote
John Banville
Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in. View quote
Michael Chabon
That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution. View quote
Michael Chabon
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read. View quote
Ross Perot
Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk's too big, the desk's too small, there's too much noise, there's too much quiet, it's too hot, it's too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all and simply to start. (Robert Harris (novelist))
An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there. View quote
Maurice Sendak
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. View quote
Jules Renard
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness. View quote
Terry Eagleton
Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it. View quote
Irwin Shaw
A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much. View quote
Irwin Shaw
I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't. View quote
Greg Egan
I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective. View quote
James Ellroy
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. View quote
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow's business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics. (Walter Russell)
Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form. View quote
Richard Matheson
If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all. View quote
Leo Burnett
I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck. View quote
Robert Sheckley
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. View quote
George Orwell