writing

“I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don’t know.”

~ Robert B. Parker

“My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it’s simply a flash somewhere in the middle.”

~ Robert Crais

“Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.” 

~ John Gregory Dunne

“Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.”

~ Joan Didion

“I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.”

~ Alistar MacCleod

“Do not be grand. Try to get the ordinary into your writing – breakfast tables rather than the solar system; Middletown today, not Mankind through the ages.”

~ Darcy O’Brien

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting… It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”

~ Gertrude Stein

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.”

~ Sinclair Lewis

“A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.”

~ Walter Percy

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices.” 

~ Ray Bradbury