Tuesday, June 29, 2010

He said/she said...


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

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