Oh, well, if you're going to be that way about it... "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not within our stars, but within ourselves." Oh, and a couple of my favorites from Mark Twain: "There are basically two types of people. People who have accomplished things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded." "A person who won't read has no advantage over the person who can't read."
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." - William Faulkner "It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about." - L. P. Hartley "I am a part of all I have read." - John Kieran
“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.” -Roger Zelazny
@minstrel Whenever I'm unsure about doing something with my writing, I just hear: "Trust your demon."
"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players...I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them" - Gore Vidal I sure hope he's right.
I love this one - gives me some hope! - "The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination." - James A. Michener.
My all time favourite is "The first draft of anything is shit." by Earnest Hemingway, followed by a close second "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." by Oscar Wilde.
"Always be a poet, even in prose." - Charles Baudelaire "Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person." - F. Scott Fitzgerald "Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." - Franz Kafka
I already posted it, but I think it's a good advice and should take home in this thread. When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. -John Gould
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing. - Benjamin Franklin
I find this by Dorothy L. Sayers (of course!) to be salutory. But it's most effective in context: Writer: But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he'll throw the whole book out of balance. Writer's Friend: You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change. Writer: I'm afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone. Friend: It might be the wisest thing you could do. Writer: Write it out and get rid of it? Friend: Yes. Writer: I'll think about that. It would hurt like hell. Friend: What would that matter, if it made a good book? (from Gaudy Night, p. 298 in the Avon Books edition)
Found an interesting quote today not from a writer but a famous painter - "I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may.But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought." - Vincent van Gogh Thought this was very relevant to writing
Good one Mackers - Actually there are a lot of artist quotes that are relevant to writers - I love this one from Dali - "A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others."
"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." – Somerset Maugham
'Talent is as cheap as table salt. What separates the talented people from the successful people is a lot of damn hard work.' -Stephen King
I like the one in my sig. I also like: "Anyway, I was sitting at home and had a profound experience, I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life. This did not make me a writer, but provided the incentive to discover that I am a writer." - Hubert Selby Jr.
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it." -- Ernest Hemingway
Some of my favourites. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” ― Ernest Hemingway “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.” ― Stephen King “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
Not from writer per se, but it's witty nonetheless: "Avoid using the word 'very', because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, the laziness will not do." - Dead Poets Society, 1989
