William Bryant > William's Quotes

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.”
― Red Smith, To Absent Friends

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L'Amour

“What I'm really scared of is believing the words society makes me speak are my own.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“People can easily pass judgment on others when they’re protected by their own normality.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin