David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious." James Thayer
"I need time to develop the idea into a plot before I talk about it." James Thayer
"I researched fiction writing for months before I taught my first class, much of it looking for strong techniques from bestselling authors." James Thayer
"I've never discovered the idea for my next novel while I was still working on the current novel. Other writers don't suffer this." James Thayer
"My experience is that an original and compelling idea for a novel is a rare thing." James Thayer
"My students—all adults—bring a lot of writing skill to the first class, and they and I get better as the class progresses." James Thayer
"On opening sentences: "If in the first chapter a hurricane is going to blow down an oak tree which falls through the kitchen roof, there's no need to first describe the kitchen." James Thayer
"The difference between showing and telling can be set out in four words. Showing reveals. Telling explains." James Thayer
"When I was hired by the University of Washington extension school to teach the one-year fiction writing course—96 classroom hours—I quickly determined that I knew only about an hour's worth off the top of my head." James Thayer
"As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer." Hunter S. Thompson
"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist." Hunter S. Thompson
"I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me." Hunter S. Thompson
"I'm a word freak. I like words. I've always compared writing to music. That's the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it's like music." Hunter S. Thompson
"If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." Hunter S. Thompson
"Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life." Hunter S. Thompson
"The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism." Hunter S. Thompson
"The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character." Hunter S. Thompson
"Writing is the flip side of sex—it's only good when it's over." Hunter S. Thompson
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." Henry David Thoreau
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." Henry David Thoreau
"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years." Henry David Thoreau
"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. " Henry David Thoreau
"Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated." Henry David Thoreau
"Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside." Henry David Thoreau
"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." Henry David Thoreau
"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark." Henry David Thoreau
"If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things." Henry David Thoreau
"Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are." Henry David Thoreau
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." Henry David Thoreau
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." Henry David Thoreau
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." Henry David Thoreau
"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." Henry David Thoreau
"A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen." J.R.R. Tolkien
"Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?" J.R.R. Tolkien
"Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write." J.R.R. Tolkien
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer." J.R.R. Tolkien
"They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited 'first chapters'. I have indeed written many." J.R.R. Tolkien
"All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town." Leo Tolstoy
"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you." Leo Tolstoy
"Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn." Leo Tolstoy
"The best stories don't come from 'good vs. bad' but 'good vs. good'." Leo Tolstoy
"A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules." Anthony Trollope
"Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write." Anthony Trollope
"Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both." John Truby
"No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements." John Truby
"Any character who is going to drive the story has to grab and hold the audience’s attention at all times. There must be no dead time, no treading water, no padding in the story (and no more metaphors to hammer home the point). Whenever your lead character gets boring, the story stops." John Truby
" 'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read." Mark Twain
"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read." Mark Twain
"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it." Mark Twain
"Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him." Mark Twain
"Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination." Mark Twain
"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." Mark Twain
"Comparison is the death of joy." Mark Twain
"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." Mark Twain
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." Mark Twain
"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." Mark Twain
"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way." Mark Twain
"Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own." Mark Twain
"It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech." Mark Twain
"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." Mark Twain
"My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water." Mark Twain
"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." Mark Twain
"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Mark Twain
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." Mark Twain
"The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause." Mark Twain
"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible." Mark Twain
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." Mark Twain
"Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words." Mark Twain