Writer Quotes on Writing

Here's another set of great and inspiring quotes. They all come from writers and are about writing. Enjoy!
*Apologies for the formatting - I've re-formatted about 5 times but Blogger is determined to give me problems today.

On Writing Techniques and Methods:

"The story...must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person."
       ~ Maxell Anderson
    
"First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!"
       ~ Ray Bradbury

"Make everyobyd fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with."
       ~ Nancy Ann Dibble

"My own experience is that once a story has bee written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."
       ~ Anton Chekhov

"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."
       ~Karl Kraus

On Motivation to Get Words on the Blank Page:

"Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."
       ~ Ray Bradbury 

"It is perfectly okay to write barbage - as long as you edit brilliantly."

       ~C J Cherryh


"Get it down. Take chanes. Ia may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."
      ~William Faulkner

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
       ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. "

        ~Vladimir Nabakov

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.
         ~ John Campbell

'You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart.  You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.  You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.  Come to it any way but lightly.  Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.'

          ~ Stephen King

Other Quotes On Writing:

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.
       ~Brian Adliss 


"Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil - but there is no way around them."
       ~Isaac Asimov 

" If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one...he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent."

       ~Honore de Balzac

"Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego."
       ~ David Brin

"If you have other things in your life -- family, friends, good productive day work -- these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer."

      ~ David Brin

 

"I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly."
       ~ Edge Rice Burroughs

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."
       ~Gustave Flaubert