426 Quotes About Writing-craft

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."("The Castle")

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.