426 Quotes About Writing-craft

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Reading your work out loud to yourself it's good. It helps even more if you read to people. If they start yawning that is a bad sign. Unless you are writing for children. Then your story is not bad, if you just wrote a bedtime story!

There were no thunderstorms on the night it came (his) turn to walk the Green Mile. It was seasonably cold for those parts at that time of year, in the thirties, I'd guess, and a million stars spilled across used up, picked out fields where frost glittered on fenceposts and glowed like diamonds on the dry skeletons of July's corn.

This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick—then it’s personal. The bad guy isn’t just the “bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!

Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

Any idiot can write a long book. All it takes is patience and a willingness to keep pounding on the keys. A short book is a challenge. It's all about what you don't say. What you trust the reader to bring with them.

You can't have a conversation with your descendants when you are dead, but they can when they are alive; write a book!