426 Quotes About Writing-craft

Some poems write themselves.

Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She’s a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being “in the mood” to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period. So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

The fictional world you create as an author is the real world to the characters who inhabit it.

I think, as writers, we all want a validation to finish our story because there are so many needs to drop it.

I write for a living, and live for writing.

I'm more of a meanderer. (i.e. I start out with a plot and then like to wander off and explore. I'm usually forced to return under protest.)

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure.

[My list] of unwritten books grows longer every year--which may be a blessed relief to the book-buying public but is a source of real dissatisfaction to me.