Writers
comment on other writers,
& on the writing profession.
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.
--Matthew Arnold.The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
--John Campbell.Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald.Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
--Robert A. Heinlein.The only way to learn to write is to write.
--Peggy Teeters.Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance.
--Stanley Schmidt.Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
--Orson Scott Card.If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.
--William C. Gault.I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams.It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
--William Faulkner.Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
--Harlan Ellison.I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
--Stephen King.I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.In science there is a dictum: Don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. 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.It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
--Robert Benchley.Reading and weeping opens the door to one's heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one's soul.
--M. K. Simmons.My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
--Ernest Hemingway.One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
--Niyi Osundare.I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
--Truman Capote.If you start with a bang, you won't end with a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot.You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer.
--Stephen Leigh.It is perfectly okay to write garbage -- as long as you edit brilliantly.
--C. J. Cherryh.Never throw up on an editor.
--Ellen Datlow.Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
--Elbert Hubbard.The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
--Larry Niven.When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing -- and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)
--Daniel Quinn.As for the adjective, when in doubt leave it out.
--Mark Twain.Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
--E. L. Doctorow.If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
--Somerset Maugham.Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
--Barbara Kingsolver.Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
--V. S. Pritchett.Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
--Christopher Hampton.No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
--E. B. White.When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: "House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day."
--Neil Gaiman.The historian records, but the novelist creates.
--E. M. Forster.The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
--Thomas Jefferson.I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.
--Clarence Budington Kelland.To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
--Herman Melville.If the sex scene doesn't make you want to do it -- whatever it is they're doing -- it hasn't been written right.
--Sloan Wilson.Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.
--Henry James.The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea.
--Thomas Mann.There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
--Terry Pratchett.The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.
--Mickey Spillane.Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.
--Jules Renard.The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.
--George Bernard Shaw....I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together -- often doing things far more complicated and sophisticated than I could with brute conscious effort. I would have ideas for "nodes," as I think of them -- story or character details that have lots of potential connections to other such nodes -- and even though I didn't quite understand, I would plunk them in. Two hundred pages later, everything would back-fit, and I'd say, "Ah, that's why I wrote that."
--Tad Williams.I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
--Stephen Wright (comedian).
We accept PayPal for your convenience. Click the banner to go to PayPal.
"Above all else...be understood!"
Experienced professional
writers available on a wide variety of subjects
for books, screenplays, speeches, etc. We can handle it.
Ghostwriters Central
Michael McKown/Editor
E-mail us today:
888-743-9939
toll free
818-433-4050 local
10-6 West Coast Time
18645 Hatteras
St., #401
Tarzana, CA 91356
WE ARE PLEASED
TO SIGN NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS
TO PROTECT YOUR VALUABLE INFORMATION.
We work strictly
on a service basis. We never do work for deferred pay or royalties.
Please see our rates for more detail.
We acknowledge
that the quotes above are the property of the authors, their publishers
or the public at large.