A couple of people have asked me to post the quotations which appeared on the slideshow during our meeting last Sunday. I do so with pleasure; there are thousands of good quotes about writing, but these are some of my favorites:
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
— Mark Twain
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
— E.L. Doctorow
"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea."
— Thomas Mann
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost
"The expert at anything was once a beginner."
— Rutherford B. Hayes
"Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads."
— Erica Jong
"There is no perfect time to write. There’s only now."
— Barbara Kingsolver
"The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn’t write."
— unknown
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham
"Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."
— Red Smith
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
— Elmore Leonard
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau
"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any."
— Orson Scott Card
