All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

“Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. ”

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”

“one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.”

“A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”

“Imagination is Everything!”

“Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)”

“No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”

“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it”

“You don’t need to wait for inspiration to write. It’s easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing…”

“Isn’t it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.”

“If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”

“The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.”

“Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.”