David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either." Meg Cabot
"All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them… They might get mad." Meg Cabot
"Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best." Meg Cabot
"For each book, I do end up making a kind of playlist to fit the characters." Meg Cabot
"Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative." Meg Cabot
"I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years—I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction." Meg Cabot
"I don't give books as gifts. Books are extremely personal, and I would hate to give someone a book that they don't like or want, because it would break my heart if they didn't read it." Meg Cabot
"I just got a fortune cookie that says "Turn off your computer and read a book" which is odd because I'm WRITING a book…on my computer!" Meg Cabot
"I like to think of my books and the movies of my books living in two separate universes. Each is very nice, but only one is correct—the book. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the other versions, and I always do." Meg Cabot
"I think if I hadn't been a writer, I'd have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn't going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!" Meg Cabot
"I think you get so wrapped up in the book you're currently writing, it's hard to think about anything else. But I know as soon as I'm done with this book, I'll move on to something else." Meg Cabot
"I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on… and The Princess Diaries was born!" Meg Cabot
"If you're writing a screenplay, you need to be prepared to let go: there's a good chance the words you write aren't going to be the ones that end up on screen." Meg Cabot
"In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist." Meg Cabot
"One of the biggest motivations for me with writing my books is to offer girls some escapism, especially girls who really need it, like I did." Meg Cabot
"Save your rejections so that later when you are famous you can show them to people and laugh." Meg Cabot
"Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor." Meg Cabot
"Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain—believe me, I've tried." Meg Cabot
"Strong female characters—even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might—make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix." Meg Cabot
"Summer is my favorite time to read mysteries." Meg Cabot
"This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists… by spending time alone practicing what they love." Meg Cabot
"Usually writer's block arises when something is wrong internally with the story." Meg Cabot
"Writing used to be my hobby, but now that it's my job, I have no hobby—except watching TV and laying around the pool reading 'U.S. Weekly.' I have tried many hobbies, such as knitting, Pilates, ballet, yoga, and guitar, but none of them have taken." Meg Cabot
"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." Italo Calvino
"A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading." Italo Calvino
"Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them." Italo Calvino
"Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive'—and then something happens that prevents me from writing." Italo Calvino
"Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings… if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough." Italo Calvino
"For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist." Italo Calvino
"How well I would write if I were not here!" Italo Calvino
"I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running." Italo Calvino
"I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it." Italo Calvino
"I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works." Italo Calvino
"I write… sonnets… and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems." Italo Calvino
"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Italo Calvino
"I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go on into the late afternoon." Italo Calvino
"If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories." Italo Calvino
"It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear." Italo Calvino
"It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books." Italo Calvino
"My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never… occupy a place in contemporary literature." Italo Calvino
"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do." Italo Calvino
"One reads alone, even in another's presence." Italo Calvino
"Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession." Italo Calvino
"The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor." Italo Calvino
"When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result." Italo Calvino
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered." Italo Calvino
"Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again." Italo Calvino
"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the backyard and shot it." Truman Capote
"That isn't writing at all, it's typing." Truman Capote
"All literature is gossip." Truman Capote
"I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny." Truman Capote
"My preferred pastimes are conversation, reading, travel and writing, in that order." Truman Capote
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make." Truman Capote
"Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud." Truman Capote
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself." Truman Capote
"Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down." Truman Capote
"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say." Truman Capote
"A character is what he does, yes—but even more, a character is what he means to do." Orson Scott Card
"A duel is just two murders who agree to take turns trying to kill each other." Orson Scott Card
"All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe." Orson Scott Card
"Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken." Orson Scott Card
"Anything can become a children's book if you give it to a child… Children are actually the best (and worst) audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence." Orson Scott Card
"As they say, a word to the wise is sufficient. And here I've gone and written five paragraphs." Orson Scott Card
"But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now—partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore." Orson Scott Card
"Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others." Orson Scott Card
"Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself." Orson Scott Card
"I always think of books as being like people. Even the dull ones are worthy of decent respect, but you don't have to seek them out and spend time with them." Orson Scott Card
"I buy way too many books." Orson Scott Card
"I listen to music constantly while writing." Orson Scott Card
"I saw, I wrote, and the world changed a little." Orson Scott Card
"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration." Orson Scott Card
"It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try." Orson Scott Card
"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space." Orson Scott Card
"No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading." Orson Scott Card
"Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief." Orson Scott Card
"Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited…" Orson Scott Card
"The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe." Orson Scott Card
"The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow." Orson Scott Card
"The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell." Orson Scott Card
"The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you." Orson Scott Card
"The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending—the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending." Orson Scott Card
"There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever." Orson Scott Card
"We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something." Orson Scott Card
"When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish… Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer." Orson Scott Card
"Working is hard and distracts from having fun." Orson Scott Card
"Writer's block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I've just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I've already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on." Orson Scott Card
"Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going." Orson Scott Card
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." Willa Cather
"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather
"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen." Willa Cather
"The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate." Willa Cather
"I'm sure, the highest capacity of storage device will not be enough to record all our stories; because everytime with you is very valuable data." cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
"A really good detective never gets married." Raymond Chandler
"At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable." Raymond Chandler
"The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring." Raymond Chandler
"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say." Raymond Chandler
"The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication." Raymond Chandler
"If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come." Raymond Chandler
"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." Raymond Chandler
"The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers." Raymond Chandler
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Anton Chekhov
"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them." Anton Chekhov
"The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly." Anton Chekhov
"Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice." Anton Chekhov
"Here I am with you and yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me." Anton Chekhov
"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying." Anton Chekhov
"They say, tell me what you've read and I'll tell you who you are." Anton Chekhov
"There is nothing new in art except talent." Anton Chekhov
"One should not put a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." Anton Chekhov
"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Anton Chekhov
"In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms." Anton Chekhov
"Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can." Anton Chekhov
"… a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious." Anton Chekhov
"In the days when I didn't know people were reading and judging me, I wrote serenely, as if eating bliny; now I am afraid when I write." Anton Chekhov
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other." Anton Chekhov
"Getting lost is just another way of saying 'going exploring'." Justina Chen
"It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly." C.J. Cherryh
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author." G.K. Chesterton
"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read." G.K. Chesterton
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." G.K. Chesterton
"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite." G.K. Chesterton
"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past." G.K. Chesterton
"In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it." G.K. Chesterton
"The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing." G.K. Chesterton
"The simplification of anything is always sensational." G.K. Chesterton
"Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street." G.K. Chesterton
"The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say." G.K. Chesterton
"People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are." G.K. Chesterton
"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it." G.K. Chesterton
"A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive." G.K. Chesterton
"Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song." G.K. Chesterton
"I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since." G.K. Chesterton
"The blank page is God's way of letting us know how hard it is to be God." G.K. Chesterton
"Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written." G.K. Chesterton
"When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : 'What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read.' " G.K. Chesterton
"Don't get it right—get it WRITTEN!" Lee Child
"I know there's a proverb which says 'To err is human', but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries." Agatha Christie
"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. " Agatha Christie
"A love of tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril; but the new view must come, the world must roll forward." Winston Churchill
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." Winston Churchill
"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public." Winston Churchill
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." Winston Churchill
"Broadly speaking short words are best and the old words when short, are best of all." Winston Churchill
"In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet." Winston Churchill
"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." Robert Cormier
"Life is like reading a book… Sometimes when you need to move forward you just have to start the next chapter." Christie Cote
"Consider the public. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all never, never, never bore the living hell out of it." Noel Coward
"I have always been very fond of them (drama critics)… I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it." Noel Coward
"I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise." Noel Coward
"I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health." Noel Coward
"What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining." Noel Coward
"Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster." Quentin Crisp
"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper." Michael Cunningham
"A writer should always feel like he's in over his head." Michael Cunningham
"As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared." Michael Cunningham
"As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers." Michael Cunningham
"Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves." Michael Cunningham
"Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write." Michael Cunningham
"I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself." Michael Cunningham
"I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head." Michael Cunningham
"I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions." Michael Cunningham
"I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years." Michael Cunningham
"I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss." Michael Cunningham
"I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act." Michael Cunningham
"If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed." Michael Cunningham
"Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear." Michael Cunningham
"Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest." Michael Cunningham
"She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric." Michael Cunningham
"Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper." Michael Cunningham
"The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things." Michael Cunningham
"Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things." Michael Cunningham
"Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old." Michael Cunningham
"What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?" Michael Cunningham
"You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire—that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book." Michael Cunningham
"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas." Marie Curie
"I'm easy. Put me in an interesting location with good people and I'm there." Jane Curtin