alex > alex's Quotes

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

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

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

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“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

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

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

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

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

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L'Amour

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

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

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

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
― Philip José Farmer

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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