David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that's about all." J.D. Salinger
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's." J.D. Salinger
"Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason." J.D. Salinger
"I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself." J.D. Salinger
"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly… But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it." J.D. Salinger
"I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door." J.D. Salinger
"I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot." J.D. Salinger
"I'm up to my ears in unwritten words." J.D. Salinger
"Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books." J.D. Salinger
"Some stories, my property, have been stolen. Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked, and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel." J.D. Salinger
"I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." J.D. Salinger
"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy." J.D. Salinger
"What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in awhile." J.D. Salinger
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." J.D. Salinger
"Writing a book is a horrible exhausting struggle; one would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon." J.D. Salinger
"You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it." J.D. Salinger
"A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic." Robert J. Sawyer
"Every creative writing student has heard the rule that you should show, not tell, but this principle seems to be among the hardest for beginners to master." Robert J. Sawyer
"The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books." Robert J. Sawyer
"One should use common words to say uncommon things." Arthur Schopenhauer
"A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short." Arthur Schopenhauer
"A word too much always defeats its purpose." Arthur Schopenhauer
"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents." Arthur Schopenhauer
"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible." Arthur Schopenhauer
"How very learned many a man would be if he knew everything that was in his own books!" Arthur Schopenhauer
"I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage." Arthur Schopenhauer
"Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own." Arthur Schopenhauer
"That you should write down valuable ideas that occur to you as soon as possible goes without saying: we sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought." Arthur Schopenhauer
"The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting." Arthur Schopenhauer
"The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say." Arthur Schopenhauer
"There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. … The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say." Arthur Schopenhauer
"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process." Arthur Schopenhauer
"Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible." Arthur Schopenhauer
"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience." Arthur Schopenhauer
"Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first." Arthur Schopenhauer
"First Rule of Collaboration: If you can't link to it, it didn't happen." Joseph Scott
"I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs,
is making a chore
for the reader who reads." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"Ninety percent of the children's books patronize the child and say there's a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don't do that. I treat the child as an equal." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"I am not a consecutive writer." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably… drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"Reading can take you places you have never been before." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"This book is to be read in bed." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"We throw in as many fresh words as we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it alive and vital. Virtually every page is a cliff-hanger—you've got to force them to turn it." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read." Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
"A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there." George Bernard Shaw
"An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile." George Bernard Shaw
"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads." George Bernard Shaw
"Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby." George Bernard Shaw
"I do not know what I think until I write it." George Bernard Shaw
"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation." George Bernard Shaw
"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself." George Bernard Shaw
"My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion." George Bernard Shaw
"My reputation grows with every failure." George Bernard Shaw
"Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty." George Bernard Shaw
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad." George Bernard Shaw
"Style is a sort of melody that comes into my sentences by itself. If a writer says what he has to say as accurately and effectively as he can, his style will take care of itself." George Bernard Shaw
"Syllables govern the world." George Bernard Shaw
"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules." George Bernard Shaw
"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time." George Bernard Shaw
"The play was a great success, but the audience was a dismal failure." George Bernard Shaw
"The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas." George Bernard Shaw
"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God." Sidney Sheldon
"Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page." Sidney Sheldon
"Being poor is only romantic in books." Sidney Sheldon
"You don't know what can happen tomorrow. Life is like a novel, isn't it? It's filled with suspense. You never know what's going to happen until you turn the page." Sidney Sheldon
"Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page." Sidney Sheldon
"Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do." Sidney Sheldon
"When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours." Sidney Sheldon
"It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all." Will Shetterly
Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk." Will Shetterly
The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant." Will Shetterly
"All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk." Wilbur Smith
"At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes." Wilbur Smith
"Authors can only soft sell the environment. Create a wonderful story around the environment involving the characters that leaves a lasting impression on the reader's mind." Wilbur Smith
"Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them." Wilbur Smith
"For the past few years my fans have made it very clear that they would like to read my novels and revisit my family of characters faster than I can write them. For them, I am willing to make a change to my working methods so the stories in my head can reach the page more frequently." Wilbur Smith
"I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy; reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience." Wilbur Smith
"I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind." Wilbur Smith
"I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty—but life, for me, is a violent thing." Wilbur Smith
"I put my soul into every book I write." Wilbur Smith
"I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background." Wilbur Smith
"I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am." Wilbur Smith
"I still get enormous pleasure and a sense of fulfillment out of writing a book that I'm proud of. I see myself as a bit like a jewel-maker who can sit back and admire his work." Wilbur Smith
"I think money is essential to happiness and right now I wouldn't want to be anyone other than Wilbur Smith—I've had a fantastic life, rewarded far more heavily than I deserve. Maybe I'd like to be J. K. Rowling, but I'll settle for second best." Wilbur Smith
"I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I'm a manipulator as well." Wilbur Smith
"I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books." Wilbur Smith
"I work on my novels wherever I have a PC, and I have four or five places around the world where I do have a PC. These days you can just slip a little flash drive into your top pocket, fly for 12 hours, come to another place, plug it into a computer and you are away again." Wilbur Smith
"I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes." Wilbur Smith
"I'm a feminist. The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past." Wilbur Smith
"I've been associated with Macmillan for over 45 years. I'd like to thank them for their continued commitment to my backlist and I look forward to continuing to work with them as they publish my next novel, 'Vicious Circle' in 2013." Wilbur Smith
"It's probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one." Wilbur Smith
"Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them." Wilbur Smith
"My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench." Wilbur Smith
"My mama loved books; I became fascinated by the wonderful stories that came out of these things she held in her hand—and started to make them up myself." Wilbur Smith
"People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled." Wilbur Smith
"Real men read my books." Wilbur Smith
"The first novel I wrote was a monster—clocking in at 180,000 words—but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off." Wilbur Smith
"The first story I ever sold was to 'Argosy' magazine, which no longer exists. That issue also contained work by several other more celebrated writers, like Ray Bradbury—so I felt I had at least one toe on the ladder." Wilbur Smith
"This first print run of the first edition of my first novel, 'When The Lion Feeds.' back in 1964, is so rare it can fetch several thousand pounds at auction. I always wanted to be an author, and I decided to write about what I knew." Wilbur Smith
"To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet." Wilbur Smith
"Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: 'What was all that about, Smith? It's fine, just get on with it.'" Wilbur Smith
"What I like about writing is the sense of godlike power it gives you." Wilbur Smith
"Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you'll mostly fall flat on your face, because it's impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That's how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It's hard work." Wilbur Smith
"You don't turn out as many books as I did then by sitting around, being cozy with the family." Wilbur Smith
"You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop." Wilbur Smith
"Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so." Lemony Snicket
"The most useful tool for editing is a single word: WHY? Why is my character doing this? Why is my character doing this now? Why is my character doing this here? Why does my character react this way? Why am I writing this scene from this character’s point of view? Why am I choosing these details to describe what my character experiences? Why did I include this? Why? Why? Why?" Alexandra Sokoloff
"I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop." Alexandra Sokoloff
"People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning." Steven Spielberg
"All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that why is takes so long." Steven Spielberg
"Audiences are harder to please if you're just giving them effects, but they're easy to please if it's a good story." Steven Spielberg
"Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry." Steven Spielberg
"I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting." Steven Spielberg
"I didn't read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I'm older. I read them all." Steven Spielberg
"I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot." Steven Spielberg
"I dream for a living." Steven Spielberg
"I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story." Steven Spielberg
"I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking." Steven Spielberg
"It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about." Steven Spielberg
"Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers." Steven Spielberg
"The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie, not necessarily one of my movies, brings a whole set of unique experiences. Now, through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time." Steven Spielberg
"The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts." Steven Spielberg
"The public has an appetite for anything about imagination—anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible." Steven Spielberg
"The work that I'm proudest of is the work that I'm most afraid of." Steven Spielberg
"We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life." Steven Spielberg
"When I don't have a story to tell, I'm a terror to live with." Steven Spielberg
"Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?" Steven Spielberg
"You shouldn't dream your film, you should make it!" Steven Spielberg
"I write the ending first. Nobody reads a book to get to the middle." Mickey Spillane
"The first page sells your book. The last page sells your NEXT book." Mickey Spillane
"In fiction, action denotes something happening, not necessarily physical movement. Adversarial dialogue is action." Sol Stein
"A writer who always has his characters 'walk' is missing opportunities." Sol Stein
"Nonfiction conveys information. Fiction evokes emotion." Sol Stein
"There are at least five ways to characterize [a person]:
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." John Steinbeck
"Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play." John Steinbeck
"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable." John Steinbeck
"No one wants advice—only corroboration." John Steinbeck
"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business." John Steinbeck
"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true." John Steinbeck
"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard." John Steinbeck
"Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals." John Steinbeck
"Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." Gloria Steinem
"A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both." Gloria Steinem
"Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't." Gloria Steinem
"I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know." Gloria Steinem
"I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life." Gloria Steinem
"I do not like to write—I like to have written." Gloria Steinem
"I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk." Gloria Steinem
"If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel." Gloria Steinem
"No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't." Gloria Steinem
"Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, 'But I just looked an hour ago!' " Gloria Steinem
"There is no better moment in life than finding the right word." Gloria Steinem
"Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square." Gloria Steinem
"A novel is a mirror carried along a main road." Stendhal
"I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing." Stendhal
"Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore." Stendhal
"I still can't decide which is more fun—reading or writing." Rex Stout
"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat." Rex Stout
"There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money." Rex Stout
"I don't drink while I'm writing because it fuddles my logical processes, but when I finish a book I go down to the kitchen and pour myself a big belt." Rex Stout
"Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but [Arthur Conan] Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones." Rex Stout
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." William Strunk Jr.
"A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone." Jonathan Swift
"Books, the children of the brain." Jonathan Swift
"Fine words! I wonder where you stole them." Jonathan Swift
"Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style." Jonathan Swift
"When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me." Jonathan Swift