426 Quotes About Writing-craft

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there’s a high chance it won’t work.

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.

If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.

I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie