Aren Lerner > Aren's Quotes

“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

“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...

It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
― Gertrude Stein

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

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

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

“You become what you think about all day long.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

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

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

“A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

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

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

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“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

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“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

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
― Mark Twain

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly