Alison > Alison's Quotes

“What is your advice to young writers?”
“Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”
― Sidney Sheldon

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”
― Jackie Collins

“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
― Franz Kafka

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
― Tom Waits

“A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.”
― Phyllis A. Whitney, Guide to Fiction Writing

“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.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”
― Harper Lee

“You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.”
― Warren Ellis