wise guys: words on writing and writers

I used to have my collection of writing quotes on the right sidebar. They rotated, which jolted the page, which some people found irritating. So I took them off. But I still add to them now and then (I added one today, as a matter of fact) and I decided to put them here all at once. Do you have a favorite among these? Do any of them strike you as off? If you have a favorite that isn’t here, please put it in the comments.

…Yet readers still want to wonder what happened next, and unless you make them wonder, they will not turn the page. You must master plot, because no matter how profound or illuminating your vision of the world may be, you cannot convey it to those who do not read you.

— Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction

A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

— Louis L’Amour

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

— Susan Griffin, Straight

Rule one of reading other people’s stories is that whenever you say ‘well that’s not convincing’ the author tells you that’s the bit that wasn’t made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

— Neil Gaiman

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

— Samuel Johnson

We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.

— Cecil Day-Lewis

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

— Gertrude Stein

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

— E.L. Doctorow

I hate writing; I love having written.

— Dorothy Parker

Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.

— W. Somseret Maugham

People have writer’s block not because they can’t write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

— Anna Quindlen, NYT, 9.23.02

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

— Thomas Mann

Being a writer means having homework for the rest of your life.

— Lawrence Kasdan

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

— W. Somseret Maugham

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

— Albert Camus

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

— Elmore Leonard

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others

— Virginia Woolf

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

— Voltaire

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

— Dr Seuss

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose.

— Dr Seuss

Writing: the only time in your life when you really are Master of a Universe.

— Lynn Viehl

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

— Hanna Arendt

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

— Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome 1911

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.

— Elmore Leonard

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

— Mark Twain

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

— Baltasar Gracián

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

— E.B. White

It’s all a draft until you die.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

— Stephen King

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

— Mark Twain

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

— Thomas Jefferson

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible

— Vladimir Nabokov

Inspiration exists but it has to find you working.

— Pablo Picasso

The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then when they are up there, throw rocks at them.

— Vladimir Nabokov

PLOT: it builds character.

The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange.

— Walt Whitman

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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.

— George Orwell, Why I Write

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

— Gore Vidal, Dalls: Times Herald. 18 June 1978

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

— Orson Scott

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

— Stephen King

There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.

— Jim Thompson

 

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