John > John's Quotes

“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

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

“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

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

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

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

“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

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

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

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

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

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“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

“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

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

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

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“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