David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"I do not write characters. I write human beings." Henrik Ibsen
"A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed." Henrik Ibsen
"If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug." Henrik Ibsen
"Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul." Henrik Ibsen
"I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function." Greg Iles
"And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out." Greg Iles
"Just because you will not see the work completed, does not mean you are free not to take it up." Greg Iles
" 'See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was." Greg Iles
"Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue." John Irving
"I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin." John Irving
"I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have." John Irving
"With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes." John Irving
"I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour." John Irving
"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." John Irving
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin." John Irving
"There's no reason you should write any novel quickly." John Irving
"Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel." John Irving
"When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it—in part, to see how it was constructed." John Irving
"One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are." John Irving
"I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions." John Irving
"I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read." John Irving
"I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual." John Irving
"I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography." John Irving
" 'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write." John Irving
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina." John Irving
"I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey." John Irving
"Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do—I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part." John Irving
"I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station." John Irving
"If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life." John Irving
"I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story—better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it." John Irving
"I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either—except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter." John Irving
"I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse." John Irving
"One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself." Christopher Isherwood
"It seemed to me then that to have published a book—any kind of book—would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life." Christopher Isherwood
"A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about." Christopher Isherwood
"It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word." Andrew Jackson
"The reader is the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless." Shirley Jackson
"I am a big fan of outlining. I write an outline. Then a slightly more detailed outline. Then another with even more detail. Sentences form, punctuation is added, and eventually it all turns into a book." A.J. Jacobs
"My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads." A.J. Jacobs
"Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system." A.J. Jacobs
"I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect." Henry James
"I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect." Henry James
"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature." Henry James
"Plot is characters under stress." Henry James
"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life." Henry James
"Struggle. Character. Plot. Emotion. All interwoven when a story is told." Steven James
"I do NOT outline." J.A. Jance
"I don't plan the books. I know which book I'm supposed to write and we sort of agree on a title and then when I start I try to find out who's dead—I write murder mysteries so you might just as well find out who's dead—and then spend the rest of book trying to find out who did it and how come." J.A. Jance
"I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves." J.A. Jance
"I write to get to the end and find out what happened. I write for the same reason readers read. I think one assumes that when a book stops, it stops. But that is erroneou—at least it is for me—because my characters go on living their lives and I don't know what they've been up to until I turn on my computer and find out what's been going on." J.A. Jance
"When I began writing, the words that inspired me were these: A writer is someone who has written today. If you want to be a writer, what's stopping you?" J.A. Jance
"When you have an important story to tell, the words you need seem to come of their own accord." J.A. Jance
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." Thomas Jefferson
"A books should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it." Samuel Johnson
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good." Samuel Johnson
"A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit." Samuel Johnson
"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it." Samuel Johnson
"Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen." Samuel Johnson
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all." Samuel Johnson
"Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters." Samuel Johnson
"Every author does not write for every reader." Samuel Johnson
"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language." Samuel Johnson
"He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood." Samuel Johnson
"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read." Samuel Johnson
"I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works." Samuel Johnson
"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends." Samuel Johnson
"It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them." Samuel Johnson
"Never trust a man who writes more than he reads." Samuel Johnson
"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library." Samuel Johnson
"Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again." Samuel Johnson
"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." Samuel Johnson
"The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you." Samuel Johnson
"The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." Samuel Johnson
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make one book." Samuel Johnson
"The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it." Samuel Johnson
"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new." Samuel Johnson
"The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers." Samuel Johnson
"There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets." Samuel Johnson
"What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure." Samuel Johnson
"While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best." Samuel Johnson
"Words are but the signs of ideas." Samuel Johnson
"You can never be wise unless you love reading." Samuel Johnson
"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Samuel Johnson
"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why." James Joyce
"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination." James Joyce
"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works." James Joyce