David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites." Piers Paul Read
"Truth is always duller than fiction." Piers Paul Read
"Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait." Charles Reade
"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted." Jules Renard
"It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish." Jules Renard
"Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none." Jules Renard
"Talent is a matter of quantity. Talent does not write one page, it writes three hundred." Jules Renard
"The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it." Jules Renard
"When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness." Jules Renard
"Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins." Jules Renard
"Words are the small change of thought." Jules Renard
"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money." Jules Renard
"You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying." Jules Renard
"It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character." Michelle Richmond
"To be a writer you have to write—and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you." Michelle Richmond
"A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening." Michelle Richmond
"Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down to print, between covers of a book, a story is not immune to alteration." Michelle Richmond
"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before." Jacob Riis
"The mystery story is really two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen." Mary Roberts Rinehart
"I had a vision… of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life." Mary Roberts Rinehart
"It is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work." Mary Roberts Rinehart
"It is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!" Mary Roberts Rinehart
"My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest." Mary Roberts Rinehart
"The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab." Mary Roberts Rinehart
"There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain." Mary Roberts Rinehart
"You can fix anything but a blank page." Nora Roberts
"A good story's like a door, and you can go through it whenever you need to. After you've read it or seen it or heard it, you can still go back through it. Once it's yours, it's always yours." Nora Roberts
"Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other." Nora Roberts
"Actually, I find it great fun to develop family series with lots of characters." Nora Roberts
"And each book has to receive your best effort every single time. No slacking." Nora Roberts
"Anything worth anything can be found in books." Nora Roberts
"As a rule of thumb, I'd say one cliché per [Romance]—and then be damn sure you can make it work." Nora Roberts
"Being a good writer meant he could make a living and do as he chose. Being a great one would bring responsibilities and expectations he had no desire to face." Nora Roberts
"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing." Nora Roberts
"Every single book is a challenge." Nora Roberts
"Every time I hear writers talk about 'the muse,' I just want to bitch-slap them. It's a job. Do your job." Nora Roberts
"Every writer has to figure out what works best—and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits." Nora Roberts
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?" Nora Roberts
"For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected—the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American." Nora Roberts
"Good fiction creates its own reality." Nora Roberts
"I believe strongly in writing groups such as Romance Writers Of America that offer support, information and networking." Nora Roberts
"I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page." Nora Roberts
"I decided to write category romance as I'd recently discovered them, and enjoyed them." Nora Roberts
"I do indeed write on the road. My laptop goes with me everywhere." Nora Roberts
"I do not feel obliged in my reading. I read to be entertained and to relax, and to go into another world, not because it's good for me." Nora Roberts
"I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up." Nora Roberts
"I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure." Nora Roberts
"I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft." Nora Roberts
"I don't think you can write—at least not well—if you don't love stories, love the written word." Nora Roberts
"I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down." Nora Roberts
"I loved the process of writing." Nora Roberts
"I need to write to be happy." Nora Roberts
"I read a lot—and I read a variety of genres." Nora Roberts
"I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started." Nora Roberts
"I'd always loved to read—and come from a family of readers—but I never thought about writing as a career." Nora Roberts
"I've gotten to know a number of readers from being online, and really treasure the time I've spent with them." Nora Roberts
"If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations." Nora Roberts
"Mary Stewart will always be my goddess. I can pick up one of her early books—one I've read a dozen times—and still slide right into the story." Nora Roberts
"One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written." Nora Roberts
"Popular fiction's a strong and viable force in literature. That's why it's popular" Nora Roberts
"The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character." Nora Roberts
"You can never read too many books, any kind." Nora Roberts
"You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else." Nora Roberts
"You don't find time to write. You make time. It's my job." Nora Roberts
"A writer's job is to tell the truth." Andy Rooney
"Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily." Andy Rooney
"I am not retiring. Writers don't retire. Writers never stop writing." Andy Rooney
"I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn't realize they thought. And they say, 'Hey, yeah!' And they like that." Andy Rooney
"My advice is not to wait to be struck by an idea. If you're a writer, you sit down and damn well decide to have an idea. That's the way to get an idea." Andy Rooney
"Not many people in this world are as lucky as I've been. All this time I've been paid to say what is on my mind on television. You don't get any luckier in life than that." Andy Rooney
"Nothing in fine print is ever good news." Andy Rooney
"The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don't have nuances." Andy Rooney
"The one affectation I have forced on the publisher … are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter." Andy Rooney
"The trouble with dictionaries is, they tell you more about words than you want to know without answering the question you have." Andy Rooney
"When I write, I use an Underwood #5 made in 1920. Someone gave me an electric typewriter, but there's no use pretending you can use machinery that thinks faster than you do. An electric typewriter is ready to go before I have anything to say." Andy Rooney
"Writers don't often say anything that readers don't already know, unless its a news story. A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do." Andy Rooney
"You can't be a good writer without being a good thinker." Andy Rooney
"A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons." Philip Roth
"As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be." Philip Roth
"Because you happen to be a writer doesn’t mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded." Philip Roth
"Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it." Philip Roth
"Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise." Philip Roth
"For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around." Philip Roth
"Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated." Philip Roth
"I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists." Philip Roth
"I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting." Philip Roth
"I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care." Philip Roth
"I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike—a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah." Philip Roth
"I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late datte." Philip Roth
"I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let’s leave it at that." Philip Roth
"I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really." Philip Roth
"I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen." Philip Roth
"I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on… I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living." Philip Roth
"I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again…" Philip Roth
"I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book." Philip Roth
"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't." Philip Roth
"I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did." Philip Roth
"If you don’t know the fantasy life of a country, it’s hard to write fiction about it." Philip Roth
"It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again." Philip Roth
"Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it." Philip Roth
"Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life." Philip Roth
"Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth." Philip Roth
"Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material." Philip Roth
"Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend." Philip Roth
"Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that." Philip Roth
"Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in." Philip Roth
"That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader." Philip Roth
"The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word." Philip Roth
"The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.” Philip Roth
"When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it." Philip Roth
"Writing is frustration—it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time." Philip Roth
"Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life." Philip Roth
"You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor." Philip Roth
"You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir." Martin Routh
"There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place." J.K. Rowling
"And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss." J.K. Rowling
"No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing." J.K. Rowling
"I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write." J.K. Rowling
"The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words." J.K. Rowling
"In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything." J.K. Rowling
"The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most." John Ruskin
"First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end." Bertrand Russell
"I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible. " Bertrand Russell
"I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads—prison is horribly like that." Bertrand Russell
"My advice to anyone who wishes to write is to know all the very best literature by heart, and ignore the rest as completely as possible." Bertrand Russell
"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it." Bertrand Russell
"To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews." Bertrand Russell
"Why do people read? The answer, as regards the great majority, is: 'They don't'." Bertrand Russell
"Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared." Bertrand Russell