Quotes about writing

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.

"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing"

One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: "The editor is always right." The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor's advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

I didn't write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky.

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father — if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out.