Writing Quotes of the Day

“In my first writing class, I was given the most valuable advice that a young writer could receive. The professor said, 'Take a situation that intrigues you and ask yourself two questions: Suppose? and, What if? Then turn the situation into fiction.”
Mary Higgins Clark

“One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“You have to learn how to use your energy and not squander it. In the writing process, the more a thing cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest."
Doris Lessing

“Anything that we have to learn we learn by the actually doing of it ... we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.”
Aristotle

“Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”
Colette

“In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.”
Alfred Kazin

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
Edna Ferber

“I take the reporting side of writing more seriously than the writing side. I think it really is a lot of work to get things right, so I trained myself. I sort of take notes the way photographers take photos. You just sort of scattershot, record everything, because you never know what's going to prove invaluable.”
Jon Krakauer

“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.”
Charles Bukowski

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
William Somerset Maugham