If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.
RICHARD RHODES
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language... . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.
UMBERTO ECO
Don’t leave a word misspelled [in your script]. With spell-check programs on most computers, it is easier to produce perfect, clean scripts. But you still have to read every word carefully. It’s a safe bet that a script will be rejected if it has half a dozen typos or other errors in the first ten pages. If you don’t care enough to make it clean, the rest of us don’t waste time reading it. The same goes for grammar. No excuses here.
TONY BILL
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
TOM STOPPARD
The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.
KARL KRAUS
I can write anywhere. I made up the names of the characters on a sick bag while I was on an airplane. I told this to a group of kids and a boy said, “Ah, no, that’s disgusting.” And I said, “Well, I hadn’t used the sick bag.”
J.K. ROWLING
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
PAT CONROY
In my experience, writer’s block is very real. You’ll be writing something and suddenly it stops. The characters stop talking. You’ve been happily just transcribing everything they’ve been saying, and suddenly they sit down and shut up. Suddenly, you are in deep trouble. It does happen. It’s very real.
NEIL GAIMAN
The artist must raise everything to a higher level: he is like a pump; inside him is a great pipe reaching down into the bowels of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was pooled beneath the surface and brings it forth into the sunlight in giant sprays.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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