Writing-craft Quotes

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business d...

It's the writing that teaches you.

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or th...

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and t...

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the wor...

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly c...

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.

Find the problem, find the story.

Find the problem, find the story.

Find the problem, find the story.

Find the problem, find the story.

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go ...

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a ...

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictiona...

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place...

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability....

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection long...

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, ...

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of c...

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and...

...and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your w...

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought co...

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is th...

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of...

Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars...

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a write...

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m tel...

While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revis...

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about...

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought...

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when tr...

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your e...

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to th...

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity...

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion ...

the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlyin...

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing,...

...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside...

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is...

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why...

What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and usi...

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be 'and,' 'the,' and 'I,' and 'it...

The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to...

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sens...

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the...

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters...

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas,...

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granari...

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common con...

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can thr...

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Ot...

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some ...

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and tra...

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, ...

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and ...

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.......

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fa...

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points,...

In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is m...

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least exp...

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than wh...

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying ...

Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identi...

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him ...

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chil...

Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their wo...

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about...

When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempti...

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his pro...

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen...

My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make ...

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of be...

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a myster...

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or ...

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everyt...

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can'...

When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from...

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends...