Quotes on Writing

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.