Robert > Robert's Quotes

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
― Tom Clancy

“I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.
- Ender ”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.”
― Marilyn vos Savant

“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.”
― J.K. Rowling

“I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

“I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.”
― Piers Anthony

“The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.”
― Kellie Elmore

“In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.

So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying "YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in."

And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
― Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero’s ‘sharply intelligent blue eyes’ and ‘outthrust determined chin’.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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

“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

“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

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

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.”
― Joss Whedon

“Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn't suck.”
― Joss Whedon

“Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.”
― Joss Whedon

“Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.”
― Joss Whedon

“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
― Joss Whedon

“Recognizing power in another does not diminish your own.”
― Joss Whedon

“DeWitt: Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment. And sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the people least capable of it.”
― Jane Espenson, Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon

“The thing about a hero, is even when it doesn't look like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging, he's going to keep trying to do right and make up for what's gone before, just because that's who he is.”
― Joss Whedon

“Spike (to Giles) : Oh, poor Watcher. Did your life pass before your eyes — 'Cuppa tea, cuppa tea... almost got shagged... cuppa tea'?”
― Marti Noxon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer