Betty > Betty's Quotes

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

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“If valleys are the dimples on the face of the earth, as Steven King once said, then Silicon Valley is the deepest, most sparkling dimple of them all.”
― Betty Dravis, The Toonies Invade Silicon Valley

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.”
― Doris Lessing

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

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

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

“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

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

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

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

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

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

“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

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

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.”
― Pierre Abélard, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
― Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Writers will happen in the best of families.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“Writing is a delicious agony.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks