Writing Quotes of the Day

"Your stuff starts out being just for you… but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it."--Stephen King

"Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end."--Philip Larkin

"Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds."--Ursula Le Guin

"I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read,
and I try to get it in what I write."--John D. MacDonald

"Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader."--Robin McKinley

"Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences."--Anne McCaffrey

"There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing."--H. L. Mencken

"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."--David Sedaris

"Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write my books so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded!"--Sidney Sheldon

Editors also know that the people who are really readers want to read. They hunger to read. They will forgive a vast number of clumsinesses and scamped work of every sort if the author will delight them just enough to keep them able to continue."--William Sloane