Writing Quotes - page 6

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light. (Ernest Hemingway)
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the w. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. View quote
Ernest Hemingway
If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all. View quote
Anne Tyler
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from. View quote
Anne Tyler
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other peoples backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability. View quote
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about. View quote
Octavia Butler
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people. View quote
Roald Dahl
God is love, but get it in writing. (Gypsy Rose Lee)
Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing. View quote
Kathy Acker
I hate writing, I love having written. View quote
Dorothy Parker
I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. View quote
Kazuo Ishiguro
In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it. View quote
Alex Haley
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication. View quote
Ralph Ellison
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. View quote
John Irving
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
I'm a drinker with writing problems. View quote
Brendan Behan
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring. (David Brin)
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. View quote
Don Marquis
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. View quote
Don Marquis
I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing. View quote
Alistair Maclean
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader-not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. View quote
E. L. Doctorow