Great Writing Quotes by Author William Faulkner

AP19201464389842-scaled-e1626454730706

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Read, read, read. Read everything  –  trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. … Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

Don’t “be” a writer. Be writing.

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself… alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Joseph Joubert

501755_30c60f2ed98c41bf99d3a2d8ff4289a5~mv2

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.

Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Phyllis A. Whitney

Phyllis-a-whitney-bio-back-dj-columbella-001

A good book isn’t written, it’s rewritten.

There’s only one good reason to be a writer – we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft – then you can add all the genius you like.

“As good as” always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be “as good as”; he (or she) must be “better than.”

“Reading” had always been my lifeline – an escape to that imaginary world where hurts were fictional and endings happy...

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Raymond Chandler

Raymond-chandler-43-1

The more you reason the less you create.

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Zadie Smith

B3ac208419b1ea896624d63aec9c1cfa

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

…the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.”

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Dashiell Hammett

Maxresdefault-2-1024x576

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It’s not easy once you’re out of the habit.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Gloria Naylor

Gloria Naylor

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

A myth is more powerful — and more lasting — than reality.

There is a problem in America. An Irish or Polish American can write a story and it's an American story. When a Black American writes a story, it's called a Black story. I take exception to that. Every artist has articulated to his own experience. The problem is that some people do not see Blacks as Americans.

Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven't a clue.

I don't want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Isaac Asimov

Isaac-asimov

Isaac Asimov is the author of 468 books and one of the 20th century's greatest science fiction writers. Among his books are “I, Robot” (1950) and the Foundation trilogy. 

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

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.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

It’s the writing that teaches you.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!


Great Writing Quotes by Author Joyce Carol Oates

Oates

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.

There’s only one rule of show business, or writing. And that’s don’t be boring.

If you can tell a story as briefly as possible, it’s more dramatic. If it’s too long, then it has the problems of pacing, it could get a little slow. But the shorter you can make a story, the better.

Writing is a matter of experimentation. And all writers do a lot of revision. […] you keep rewriting to find the rhythm and the voice that’s suitable for that story.

Writing is like a spiritual manifestation of something deep within us we don’t really know is there.

Keeping a journal sharpens our senses. It’s like an exercise in writing. If you’re describing a scene, you are practicing the act of writing—which is very important—and thinking in language.

There is an instinct in our species to tell stories. It’s a way of explaining the universe and explaining our world.

The only thing that’s bad for writing is being interrupted. You have to have time to write. And while that seems obvious, you’re probably living a life with a lot of interruptions.

Professional Book Editor: Your manuscript deserves an excellent edit. I'm an established book editor who has helped 300+ authors achieve their publishing dreams and am the author of 60+ published books. I deliver results at reasonable, writer-friendly rates!