Steven Turek > Steven Turek's Quotes

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
― Doris Lessing

“Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the
old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops
into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do
when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-
I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
― James Joyce

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”
― Joss Whedon

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather

“I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.”
― Philip Pullman

“I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.”
― Philip Pullman

“A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.”
― Garrison Keillor

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“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

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

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.”
― Craig Claiborne

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King