Thursday, May 28, 2009

Writing Quotes of the Day



"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page."
Eudora Welty

"All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new."
Neil Gaiman

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
Robert Frost

"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids… Just as simple as bringing them up."
Ursula K. LeGuin

"If you would write emotionally, be first unemotional. If you would move your readers to tears, do not let them see you cry."
James J. Kilpatrick

"Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax."
Colin Greenland

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."
Kingsley Amis

"The writer who cares more about words than about story – characters, action, setting, atmosphere – is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart – and its cargo – from the horse."
John Gardner

"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak."
Friederich Nietzsche

"I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write."
P. G. Wodehouse





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