Authors On Writing Quotes

The closest to my heart is not just one book - it's the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, "Gods' Food," is already available in English. ~ Sahara Sanders

Sometimes when I prepare to write, I feel the same sensation wash over me as if my toes were curling over the brink of a high cliff, my gaze peering downward into a dark pond, and I anxiously wonder, will the water prove deep enough? Will my words be satisfactory? ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Don't worry about offending people. Any time you write something thought provoking, some idiots will complain, because they hate it when you make them think. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents' house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer. ~ Sahara Sanders

If Fifty Shades is your idea of a good book, you have no idea what a good book is. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Creativity takes courage. It takes courage to bare your soul for the world. It's like taking off your armor, although you know people have pointy sticks that they love to jab into soft flesh. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

The process of creation can be unpredictable and, in some way, similar to love: the brightest waves of inspiration may sometimes occur in wrong timing, wrong places, or even with wrong people. ~ Sahara Sanders

Writers don't have bad life days; they just have good research days. ~ Julie Wright

Why is it so hard for many erotica authors to admit that erotica is porn? Everyone loves porn! ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Choosing a color for your paperback book cover feels like entering a mall and seeing a dress you love, just your size, and available in a number of colors – each of which is lovely in its own manner – so you want them all! ...But you must choose only one... Isn't this one of the hardest choices to make? :-) ~ Sahara Sanders

Having authored numerous and pretty versatile write-ups, I can't say that anything other than my soul, heart and life experience can be called a prominent part of every book I ever wrote ~ Sahara Sanders

You're not the butcher, selling sausages. You're the cow, pre-sausage. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Everyone thinks they are above average, which is statistically impossible. There have to be below average writers. But nobody sees themselves that way. That means there are a whole lot of bad writers out there, who don't even know it. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange "sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can't wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human's hand. ~ Sahara Sanders

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children - you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it. ~ Sahara Sanders

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts. ~ Dan Brown

If you don't write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers. ~ Sahara Sanders

Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life. ~ Sahara Sanders

Let it be known I am a fan of the comma; it gives cadence to my writing. Those who disagree are in their usual hurried state…not giving pause where a breath is due. ~ Nanette L. Avery

A pen name is a nickname. ~ A.D. Posey

What makes a good book? An author who knows how to leave out all the unnecessary bulk and delivers a lean story where not a single word is fluff. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly
too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System
the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse. ~ James Thurber

Friends will write me letters. They run out of room on the front of the letter. They write 'over' on the bottom of the letter. Like I'm that much of a moron. Like I need that there. Because if it wasn't there, I'd get to the bottom of the page: 'And so Kathy and I went shopping and we
' That's the craziest thing! I don't know why she would just end it that way. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

I love it, I hate it, it's ecstasy when I'm writing well, it's despair when I'm not. I wouldn't wish this life on anyone, nor would I, could I, ever give it up. ~ Jillian Medoff

You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within. ~ Robert J. Randisi

But gentlemen, as long as I am an American Citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject. ~ Elijah Parish Lovejoy

When you stepped on Jared's toes, you'd get punched in the gut. If you stepped on Jax's toes, he'd hack into the county database and issue a warrant for your arrest. ~ Penelope Douglas

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about. ~ Roger Zelazny

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No
that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. ~ Mark Twain

I think a reason why TV is exciting and getting so much better is because we [authors] get to play off of an actor's strengths and challenge them on their weaknesses. On a feature [film], you don't necessarily get to do that. You hope that they cast the right guy, who comes in and plays your part. ~ Michael Brandt

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under 'breakdowns' in the index of A Tragic Honesty. ~ Nick Hornby

I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I was writing country songs, but I wasn't listening to country yet. I grew up on a farm in East Tennessee, so my roots are country, you know? But I didn't know where those songs came from or where they fit. ~ Kelsea Ballerini

I am swimming in a sea of words, attempting to keep my head above water. ~ Christy Hall

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums? ~ Connie Willis

You made a poet fall in love with the world. ~ Avijeet Das

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth. ~ Simon Mawer

In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe. ~ Mary Karr

If a book can save - redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane - surely, there must be a God. ~ Chila Woychik

I don't like people who sit on computers all day long and write about people they don't know anything about. ~ Paris Hilton

I learned a long time ago that life introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds. ~ Roxane Gay

If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you. ~ Natalie Goldberg

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.

If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. ~ John McPhee

I have completed and uncompleted screenplays, but they both fall into the category of "unsold." I've seen quite a few movies where the screenplays seemed to be in the "uncompleted" category yet still got sold and made into movies, so I generally refer too all screenplays as "sold" or "unsold." But that's just my own filing system. ~ Gary Reilly

Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here. ~ Graham Greene

It wasn't until I had been writing on and off for maybe ten years that I started to establish any kind of routine, thought I couldn't put a finger on an exact date, and this routine relates simply to the aphorism 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.' ~ Neal Asher

A story told me by Michael Barrie: Jesus and the Blessed Virgin go out to play golf. The Blessed Virgin is at the top of her form, drives and lands on the green. Jesus slices and lands in the bushes. A squirrel picks up the ball and runs off with it. A dog grab the squirrel, which still holds the ball in its mouth. An eagle swoops down, picks up the dog, squirrel and ball, and soars into the air. Out of a clear sky, lightning strikes the eagle, which drops the dog which drops the squirrel which drops the ball, right into the hole. The Blessed Virgin throws down her driver and exclaims indignantly, 'Look, are you going to play golf or just fuck around? ~ Christopher Isherwood

It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life. ~ Christopher Isherwood

I was the first records editor at Rolling Stone, and there were no rules. There was nothing to fall back on as to how do you write about this kind of music, so people were trying absolutely everything with a great sense of freedom and experimentation and success and failure, and a feeling of, My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let's pretend they aren't because we don't want to be intimidated by what somebody might think of what we're saying. ~ Greil Marcus

The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?"

Diomedes said, "Aren't men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant."

Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: "Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it's the same with me and the Sophotechs.

"Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more val ~ John C. Wright

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series. ~ Steven Brust

Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we're thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there's a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they're making. ~ Matt Mullenweg

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own. ~ Stephen King