Mandi > Mandi's Quotes

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

“To be a good writer... read a lot and write every day.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.”
― Lili St. Crow

“Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.”
― A. Lee Martinez

“Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. ”
― E.L. Doctorow

“A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.”
― Edna Ferber

“If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.”
― Don Roff

“You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”
― Michael Chabon

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
― Robert Hass

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.”
― Nora Roberts

“You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare”
― Erica Jong

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.”
― Iain M. Banks