...Quotes on Reading, Writing @ Literature...

WhiskeyScotch

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”

― Thornton Wilder

WhiskeyScotch

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

― Ray Bradbury

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“Writing is the emotional morphine.”

― Mariam Maarouf

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“It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

― Jonathan Franzen

WhiskeyScotch

“There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
”
― Morley Callaghan

seribulan

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
—Richard Ben Cramer

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“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing

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"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."
--Anne Frank

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"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
--Franz Kafka

seribulan

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."
--Robert Louis Stevenson

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"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
--Virginia Woolf

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"Tears are words that need to be written."
--Paulo Coelho

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“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
—Tom Clancy,

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The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty

seribulan

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
—Lawrence Block,

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Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”
—Leslie Gordon Barnard,

seribulan

“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
—Fred East,

seribulan

“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
—Leigh Brackett,

WhiskeyScotch

“As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.”

― Rita Webb