Yvette > Yvette's Quotes

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”
― Donna Tartt

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

“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

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“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 do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anais Nin

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”
― Richard Price

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending.”
― Julia Quinn

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with 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

“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

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth