"A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect." - Norton Juster, though it comes from one of his characters, in the book 'The Phantom Tollbooth'.
"First off, I know nothing about publishing today and have precious little that I can say on that subject. However one point I can make is this: no legitimate publisher charges a writer money to publish a book. Only "vanity" presses do this, and they are, as far as I know,in the business of making their money off authors. I do not encourage anyone to go with a "vanity" press. --- I wish I had more to offer but I don't. On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer,write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. --- Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic.Writers are priceless. ---- Go where the pleasure is in your writing.Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write.And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules.Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way. --- Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. --- The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck." - Anne Rice
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." - George Bernard Shaw. My philosophy of life in a nutshell. And it summarizes what I think is the purpose of writing. Also: "Write drunk; edit sober." - Ernest Hemingway
"It takes absolutely nothing to go against public opinion because public opinion is wrong to hold and insane to herald because it is made of a choir of crickets. The sameness of the sound tells you the amount of the thought. Nobody stops to realize that something can happen five minutes from now and everybody will instantly think differently." - Jimmy Breslin.
“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.” ― Terry Pratchett
Q. How do you feel about your books after you’re done writing them? A. It varies. I am usually pretty disappointed with the book when I finally turn in the last draft and hear that I can’t revise it any further. I worry a lot that no one will like it and that I’ve failed and that I haven’t lived up to the story. Then when it comes out there’s a weird adjustment and I find myself really protective of the book and increasingly proud of it. Then after a while it settles into ambivalence for me, to be totally honest. I still feel proud of the books I’ve written, but they also feel very *finished* to me. They belong to their readers now, which is a great thing–because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands. - John Green This is the healthiest, most respectable, and most beneficial-to-the-world attitude that I have ever seen an author express about his own books. It is the antithesis of the widespread unhealthy and selfish attitude espoused by George RR Martin and many other authors. Maybe the modern copyright system is responsible for allowing authorial ultra-possessiveness to fester.
Dialogue is a foreign tongue, a semblance of speech and not a record of it, a language in which directness diminishes and obliqueness sings. Sol Stein
"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of." Joss Whedon
The flow of monarchy is also interrupted by coupons, and maybe the philosopher can contemplate that once the bar reopens.
Thinking that " what I must to say?" is better than regret that " what should I said?" - Saddi (olden Iranian poet )
An excellent sentiment. I truly believe that what haunts you most in your life is not what you've done, but what you didn't do.
"If I say, 'Come over to me' and you do not , it is no matter, for you will soon be gone and your children already belong to us". -AH :/
'Just write the fucking thing. If you can write a short story in a week, and spent two weeks editing it, you'll be writing a story a month. Submit a story a month, it's not hard - but it does require effort. If you can do that, I consider you a writer' - A university lecturer I once had.
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”- George Orwell
