426 Quotes About Writing-craft

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

You write what you know, and I know rock and roll.

Writing is hard. That's why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something."[There Is No Such Thing as Writers' Block: Blog post, October 7, 2001]

Contrary to popular belief, people always say "It was a pleasure doing business with you". It is the only thing that has stayed with me after an assignment. Always mix business with pleasure. That is a secret they don't want you to know. BUT never mix pleasure with business. Then you might just end up in a divorce.

Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don’t appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind.

What tame, memory-dependent work I was doing. How polite my poems were, how still they sat, how representational. We poets talked about craft, but what we meant were tricks and illusions.

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.