Writing Quotes of the Day

"The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without love and the struggle that goes with love?"
Carson McCullers

Write your heart out."
Bernard Malamud

"All writing depends on the generosity of the reader."
Alberto Manguel

"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
Lillian Hellman

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
Ernest Hemingway

"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
Erica Jong

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
Franz Kafka

"I am a man and alive . . . For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog."
DH Lawrence

"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication."
Fran Lebowitz

"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer."
Doris Lessing