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"When I face the desolate impossibility of
writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can
never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s
work is all I can permit myself to contemplate. " — John Steinbeck
"The language of logical arguments, of
proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate.
But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the
imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I
must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith. "
-- Madeleine L'Engle
"You cannot tell people what to do, you can
only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular
stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to
his immediate needs may draw his own conclusions." — Ezra Pound
"Don’t worry about people stealing your
ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s
throats." — Howard Aiken
"Fairy tales are more than true: not
because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that
dragons can be beaten." — G. K. Chesterton
"Nothing moves without the script. It is
the acorn from which the oak of a movie grows. A screenplay starts the
process of budgeting, casting, hiring of key personnel. Offices are
redecorated, monster Winnebagos are leased, trucks loaded with equipment
roll to locations, artists feverishly create scene sketches. Following the
shoot, the post-production crews, the music and sound technicians and the
marketing mavens come aboard. A hundred million dollars may well be spent
based on 120 pages or so of a screenplay by someone who might not even be
invited to the set, the dub, the mix, or the scoring session, although the
hundreds of men and women, including the director and stars who have
worked on the picture, owe their jobs to the culmination of the writer’s
work." — David Brown
"I only write when I’m inspired, so I see
to it that I’m inspired every morning at nine o’clock."
— Peter de Vries
"Why do I write such horrific stories? What
makes you think I have a choice?" — Stephen King
"Delay is natural to the writer. He is like
a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride
in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of
courage?) that will carry him along. I am apt to let something simmer for
a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around,
straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until
everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody
reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper."
— E. B. White
"Each book purchased for motion pictures
has some individual quality, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It
is the work of a great array of highly paid and incompatible writers to
distinguish this quality, separate it, and obliterate it." — Evelyn
Waugh
"After all, one knows one’s weak points so
well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and
invent others." — Edith Wharton
"Writing is an occupation in which you have
to keep proving your talent to those who have none."
— Jules Renard
"The greatest part of a writer’s time is
spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library
to make one book." — Samuel Johnson
"The artistic temperament is a disease that
afflicts amateurs. Its greatest tragedy is that it cannot produce any
art." — G. K. Chesterton
"Why don’t you write books people can
read?" — Nora Joyce, to her husband James
"In writing fiction, the more fantastic the
tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire
your words when you want them to believe your story." — Ben Bova
"Imagination is a quality given a man to
compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to
console him for what he is." — Oscar Wilde
"Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is
genius." — George Bernard Shaw
"Any reviewer who expresses rage and
loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has
put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." — Kurt Vonnegut
"You cannot tell people what to do, you can
only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular
stories of particular people and experiences, from which each according to
his immediate needs may draw his own conclusions." — Ezra Pound
"It is the writer’s privilege to help man
endure by lifting his heart." — William Faulkner
"Character is revealed by action. Action is
motivated by character." — Norton Wright
"Inside every fat book is a thin book
trying to get out." — Unknown
"Writing is like prostitution. First, you
do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally
you do it for money." — Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliére)
"Planning to write is not writing.
Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to
people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is
writing." — E. L. Doctorow
"First, find out what your hero wants, then
just follow him!" — Ray Bradbury
"After being turned down by numerous
publishers, he decided to write for posterity." — George Ade
"Books aren't written, they're rewritten.
Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially
after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." — Michael Crichton
"No one can write a best seller by trying
to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés
that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations,
the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed,
well worn nor commonplace to him." — W. Somerset Maugham
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