All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”

“Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.”

“There’s an old rule of theater that goes, ‘If there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.’ The reverse is also true.”

“Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.”

“Writing is not just a process of creation. It is also a process of self-discovery”

“If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.”

“I’ve been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it’s too late, but I see now how badly I’ve deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.”

“Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.”

“That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.”

“I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.”

“The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, ‘open your mind to me and I’ll take you to another world.”

“A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in ‘Dracula’ is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read ‘Dracula.”

“When you’re writing, you’re creating something out of nothing … A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.”[As quoted on WritersServices, 6 March 2012]”

“The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.”