Seth > Seth's Quotes

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon

“I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.”
― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

“Write about the emotions you fear the most.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.”
― Jennifer Weiner

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Here's a haiku/palindrome I wrote called, "Obsession."

Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob,
Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob,
Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob”
― Jarod Kintz, A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dipped Carrot

“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ”
― Agatha Christie

“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

“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

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

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

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

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

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

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

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

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London