Writing Quotes of the Day

"Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."
Ray Bradbury

"The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes."
Van Wyck Brooks

"Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want."
Anatole Broyard

"I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly."
Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."
Truman Capote

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
Willa Cather

"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it."
Harlan Ellison

"At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance--that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is to be--curiosity--to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does, and if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got it or not."
William Faulkner

"Observe, don't imitate."
John M. Ford