Chapter 9: quote's for writers and I'm back
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 you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
--Stephen King
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
--Anaïs Nin
"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
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
--Toni Morrison
"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
--Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
--Benjamin Franklin
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
--Saul Bellow
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
--Robert Frost
"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
--William Faulkner
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
--Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."
--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
--Henry David Thoreau
"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."
--Anne Frank
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
--Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
"Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences."
--Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
--Franz Kafka
"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
"You can make anything by writing."
--C.S. Lewis
"A word after a word after a word is power."
--Margaret Atwood
"Tears are words that need to be written."
--Paulo Coelho
"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."
--Annie Proulx
"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
"To survive, you must tell stories."
--Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
"Always be a poet, even in prose."
--Charles Baudelaire
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
--Isaac Asimov
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
--Albert Camus
"I write to discover what I know."
--Flannery O'Connor
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
― John Steinbeck
"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time--proof that humans can work magic."
― Carl Sagan
"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."
― Hermann Hesse
"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
― Norman Mailer
"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
"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand."
― Ernest Hemingway
"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
― Friedrich Nietzsche
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
--Thomas Jefferson
"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative."
-- Elmore Leonard
"Writers live twice."
-- Natalie Goldberg
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."
--Herman Melville
"Words are a lens to focus one's mind."
- Ayn Rand
"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."
--Gustave Flaubert
"Writing is its own reward."
--Henry Miller
"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."
--Sidney Sheldon
"I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged."
--Erica Jong
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
--Douglas Adams
"Half my life is an act of revision."
--John Irving
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."
--William Faulkner
"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being."
--A. A. Milne
"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. "
--Lady Gaga
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