quotes

I was trying to find a quote by, I think, C. S. Lewis, but I could not. However, I found several lists of quotes and because I just feel like following the crowd tonight, I’m going to post some of my favorite. If you would like to read them all, you can find them here. I’m thinking about taking some of the really interesting ones and writing my own opinions about them as well.

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me. –Jack Dann

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish. –Monica Dickens

There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world. –John Fowles

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.–Melinda Haynes

Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible.–Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly. –John D. MacDonald

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. –William Faulkner

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.–William Zinsser

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster. –Isaac Asimov

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.–E. L. Doctorow

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it. –Harlan Ellison

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby. –Paavo Haavikko

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. –Eugene Ionesco

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.–Stephen King

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.–Ursula K. LeGuin

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. –Somerset Maugham

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them..–Charles Caleb Colton

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge. –Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Imagination is more important than knowledge. –Albert Einstein

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper. –T. S. Eliot

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.–Natalie Goldberg

For all my longer works, for example novels, I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on. –Garth Nix

When in doubt, blow something up. –J. Michael Straczynski

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.–Orson Scott Card

Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. –Catherine O’Hara

And, finally, I shall end with a very fitting saying that sums up how I just wasted a half of hour reading all of these quotes.

Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.–Anonymous