“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.” ~ Will Self
“I wouldn’t have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There’s a story and there’s a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader’s attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.”
“I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: ‘Am I being joyful?’ And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you’re writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.” ~ Ray Bradbury
“Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle
“I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, ‘You got to have fun at this, or it’ll drive you nuts.'” ~ Elmore Leonard
“The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.” ~ Raymond Chandler
“The first Chapter Law is, “Don’t spend much time on it. You’re going to have to rewrite it.” ~ Tony Hillerman
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” ~ Virginia Woolf
“Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.”
