David Lovelock collects quotations on writing.
"Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers." Edward Abbey
"As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart." Edward Abbey
"I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself." Edward Abbey
"In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty." Edward Abbey
"The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book." Edward Abbey
"What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well." Edward Abbey
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Douglas Adams
"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." Douglas Adams
"…to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before…" Douglas Adams
"After ten years of word processing, I can't even do hand writing anymore." Douglas Adams
"Hundreds of people who've never written before send in 'Dr. Who' scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is." Douglas Adams
"I remember very little about writing the first series of 'Hitchhiker's.' It's almost as if someone else wrote it. " Douglas Adams
"I used to be a great fan of doing crosswords. When you're fiddling around with anagrams, you get wonderful jumbles of syllables that become interesting." Douglas Adams
"I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken." Douglas Adams
"In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing." Douglas Adams
"Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive." Douglas Adams
"Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food." Douglas Adams
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind." Douglas Adams
"There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.' " Douglas Adams
"This sentence is not true." Douglas Adams
"We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books." Douglas Adams
"When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty." Douglas Adams
"Where do you get inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea." Douglas Adams
"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." Douglas Adams
"After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity." George Ade
"A man never feels more important than when he receives a telegram containing more than ten words." George Ade
"I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy." George Ade
"Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense." George Ade
"The only literary men are those who have to work at it." George Ade
"When Wealth walks in at the Door, the Press Agent comes in through the Window." George Ade
"A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation." Joseph Addison
"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn." Joseph Addison
"Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors." Joseph Addison
"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life." Joseph Addison
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." Joseph Addison
"Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves." Joseph Addison
"Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything." Aesop
"Fine clothes may disguise, but silly words will disclose a fool." Aesop
"One story is good, till another is told." Aesop
"There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them." Aesop
"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite." Edward Albee
"American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties." Edward Albee
"Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality." Edward Albee
"The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not." Edward Albee
"A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings." Nelson Algren
"Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much." Nelson Algren
"I am against censorship. I don't think there is anything more stupid than censorship." Nelson Algren
"I am the penny whistle of American literature." Nelson Algren
"I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write." Nelson Algren
"I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write." Nelson Algren
"I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer." Nelson Algren
"I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live; he observes." Nelson Algren
"I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens—you know, until it finds its own plot—because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working." Nelson Algren
"If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it." Nelson Algren
"New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys… But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded." Nelson Algren
"The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person." Nelson Algren
"There is no way of being a creative writer in America without being a loser." Nelson Algren
"To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent." Nelson Algren
"You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nelson Algren
"I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars." Fred Allen
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." Fred Allen
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia." Woody Allen
"If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right." Woody Allen
"All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies." Steve Almond
"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing." Kingsley Amis
"It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with." Kingsley Amis
"Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence." Kingsley Amis
"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him." Maya Angelou
"Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, 'Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody and they're going to find me out.' " Maya Angelou
"Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely." Maya Angelou
"Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader." Maya Angelou
"I don't know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other." Maya Angelou
"I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind." Maya Angelou
"I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday." Maya Angelou
"I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that." Maya Angelou
"I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music." Maya Angelou
"I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me." Maya Angelou
"I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she's reading." Maya Angelou
"I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing." Maya Angelou
"I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I'm not any of those—to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues." Maya Angelou
"I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right." Maya Angelou
"I'm happy to be a writer—of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use." Maya Angelou
"I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes." Maya Angelou
"I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.' " Maya Angelou
"It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything." Maya Angelou
"Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake." Maya Angelou
"Shakespeare—I was very influenced—still am—by Shakespeare. I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart." Maya Angelou
"The best candy shop a child can be left alone in, is the library." Maya Angelou
"The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart." Maya Angelou
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou
"To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do—that's what I mean to do." Maya Angelou
"What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat',… And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.' " Maya Angelou
"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young." Maya Angelou
"When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess." Maya Angelou
"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning." Maya Angelou
"Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication." Maya Angelou
"Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you're trying to think of." Anonymous
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe." Anonymous
"First get it written, then get it right." Anonymous
"This book fills a much-needed gap." Anonymous
"By far the greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars." Aristotle
"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man." Aristotle
"PLOT is CHARACTER revealed by ACTION." Aristotle
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." Isaac Asimov
"A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written." Isaac Asimov
"Any book worth banning is a book worth reading." Isaac Asimov
"From my close observation of writers—they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review." Isaac Asimov
"I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander." Isaac Asimov
"I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn't, I would die." Isaac Asimov
"It is almost impossible to think of something no one has thought of before, but it is always possible to add different frills." Isaac Asimov
"It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition." Isaac Asimov
"It's the writing that teaches you." Isaac Asimov
"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate." Isaac Asimov
"Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are." Isaac Asimov
"Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject… they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules." Isaac Asimov
"What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse." Isaac Asimov
"When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself." Isaac Asimov
"When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea." Isaac Asimov
"Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations." Isaac Asimov
"Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter." Isaac Asimov
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." Isaac Asimov
"Easy enough to dismiss others' problems when you had none of your own." Elizabeth Aston
"She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy." Margaret Atwood
"You know when you're not ready; you may be wrong about being ready, but you're rarely wrong about being not ready." Margaret Atwood
"A plot is just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what." Margaret Atwood
"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason." Margaret Atwood
"A word after a word after a word is power." Margaret Atwood
"All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'." Margaret Atwood
"Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted." Margaret Atwood
"If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word." Margaret Atwood
"If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending… But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone." Margaret Atwood
"If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed." Margaret Atwood
"If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof." Margaret Atwood
"Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it." Margaret Atwood
"Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy—which many believe goes hand in hand with it—will be dead as well." Margaret Atwood
"There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good." Margaret Atwood
"There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine—'Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate.' " Margaret Atwood
"There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too." Margaret Atwood
"When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical—one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float." Margaret Atwood
"When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been." Margaret Atwood
"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer." Margaret Atwood
"You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it." Margaret Atwood
"You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one." Margaret Atwood
"I love to come in and play with a wig or glasses or clothes. I love using props. I'm from the Peter Sellers school of trying to prepare for the character." Dan Aykroyd