Writer Gallery

Blog

Writer Gallery

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

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 write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

Douglas Adams

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

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

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Roald Dahl

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

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.