Beate > Beate's Quotes

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
― Stephen King

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.”
― John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, Volume 16: A Joy Forever and The Two Paths

“Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader’s desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That’s called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax.”
― Colin Greenland

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.”
― A.B. Guthrie Jr.

“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
― Judy Garland

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
― Helen Keller

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.”
― Jack Dixon

“Do not let what you can't do interfere with what you can do.”
― John Wooden

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
― George Burns

“A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!”
― Christie Silvers

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.”
― Cesare Pavese

“I went to college, but I learned to write by reading and writing.”
― Daniel Pinkwater

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

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

“One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Most men don't seem to get that telling a pissed-off woman to calm down is like throwing gunpowder on a fire.”

~ Liberty Jones”
― Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert