Ann Douglas > Ann's Quotes

“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”
― Anonymous

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

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

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.”
― Lorrie Moore

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

“Don't get it right, get it written.”
― James Thurber

“But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect.”
― Hillary Jordan, Mudbound

“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

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

“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
― Stephen King

“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

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein

“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

“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

“You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.”
― Billy Collins

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

“An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.”
― Albert Camus

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”
― Noam Chomsky

“Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”
― Stephen King

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
― Albert Einstein

“Never memorize something that you can look up.”
― Albert Einstein

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
― Albert Einstein

“Books are a narcotic.”
― Franz Kafka

“I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces