writer’s block

“I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You’re studying their mind when you read their work.” ~ Natalie Goldberg

“Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.” ~ Evelyn Waugh

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”  ~ D. H. Lawrence

“Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” ~ Orson Scott Card

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” ~ Barry Sanderson

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.  ~ Gene Wolfe

“Three Rules for Literary Success: Read a lot, write a lot, and read a lot more.”

~ Robert Silverberg

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven’t been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.” Harlan Ellison

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” ~ Virginia Woolf

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” ~ Truman Capote