39 Quotes Tagged: writing-craft

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

It's the writing that teaches you.

Writing is a holy chore.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language.

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.