The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword...
Writer’s block? I’ve heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write,
yes? Then that person isn’t a writer anymore. I’m sorry, but the job is
getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living. ~Warren
Ellis
I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done. ~Barbara Kingsolver
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day
when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and
doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only
profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and
then expects sympathy for it?
~Philip Pullman
I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as writer’s block; the
problem is idea block. When I find myself frozen–whether I’m working on
a brief passage in a novel or brainstorming about an entire book–it’s
usually because I’m trying to shoehorn an idea into the passage or
story where it has no place.
~Jeffery Deaver
You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write
yourself out of a thinking block
. ~John Rogers
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by
people in California who couldn’t write
. ~Terry Pratchett
I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my
process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with
lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing
that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be
good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing
badly and waiting for writing better to happen.
~Jennifer Egan
Writer’s block doesn’t exist…lack of imagination does
. ~Cyrese Covelli
Writer’s Block is just an excuse by people who don’t write for not
writing.
~Giando Sigurani
10. Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to
be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day
to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every
day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching
her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that
bitch.
~Lili St. Crow
XXX
"If you're a freelance writer and
aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short
shrift, you must not have been in the business very long."
-Poppy
Z. Brite
"Do not put
statements in the negative form.
And don't
start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread
your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition
can
be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use
a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified
superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession
euphemisms.
If any word
is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy
locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but
not least, avoid cliches like the plague."
-William
Safire,
"Great Rules of Writing"
"I am a
drinker
with writing problems."
- Brendan
Behan
"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a
misprint."
-Mark Twain
"When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it
happened
or not."
-Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"For your
born
writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon
the right word."
- Catherine
Drinker Brown
"One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a
habit,
and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an
obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and
psychological
as speaking or sleeping or eating."
Niyi Osundare
"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should
be doing something else."
Gloria Steinem
"The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to
the seat of the chair."
Mary Heaton Vorse
"Unlike
profiling
serial killers, writing is a lonely and depressing profession."
-Jose Chung
"The best
antidote
to writer's block is--to write."
~Henriette
Anne Klauser
"It is by
sitting
down to write every morning that one becomes a writer."
~Gerald Brenan
Millenium
Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
-Sholem Asch
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double
Standard:
they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never,
never be unfaithful to them.
-W. H. Auden
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream
while
writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to
dream.A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not
dream
while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the
right
to dream.
-Gaston Bachelard
The pen is mightier than the sword.
-Bulwer-Lytton
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular,
uninterrupted
love of writing...I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which
I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think
composition
a great pain.
- Lord Byron
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though
it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
-Elias Canetti
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its
real
difficulty and its apparent ease.
- Charles Caleb Colton
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard
themselves.
Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
-E. L. Doctorow
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
-E. L. Doctorow
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
- J. P. Donleavy
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a
road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him
with
something of wild, creative delight.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the
critics
of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason
writes.
-André Gide
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
-Samuel Johnson
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a
good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy.
Which
is what life is.
-Jack Lemmon
If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and
embroidering
it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be
put
in a gas chamber.
* John P. Marquand
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to
get
to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
-Sharon O'Brien
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.
How
else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the
moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.
That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the
changes
of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and
alarming.
Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
-Vita Sackville-West
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he
whispers.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the
most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could
be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their
colors,
or the heavens without their azure.
-Henry David Thoreau
"What
really
knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish
the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could
call
him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen
much,
though."
-JD Salinger
"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little
faster."
-Isaac Asimov
"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
-Peter De Vries
"Every writer I know has trouble writing."
-Joseph Heller
"I do not like to write - I like to have written."
-Gloria Steinem
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad."
-Lord Byron
"Outside of
a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to
read."
--Groucho
Marx
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to
the
dictionary."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Poor Faulkner Does he really think big emotions come from big
words?"
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time
reading
it."
- Moses Hadas
"...the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the
reader, and ... the dream must be vivid and continuous."
-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents,
and
everyone is writing a book."
-Marcus
Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator & writer (106-43 B.C.)
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an
apostrophe
with fur.
- Doug Larson
"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it."
Toni Morrison
"A great many people now writing would be better employed keeping
rabbits."
-Edith
Sitwell
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are
well
written, or badly written. That is all."
- Oscar Wilde
"Writing is
easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
--Red Smith
"A
character,
to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the
future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's
supposed
to be doing."
-Anthony
Burgess
"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper
until
drops of blood form on your forehead."
-Gene Fowler
