Donna Rossignol > Donna's Quotes

“If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.”
― A.M. Homes

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”
― H.G. Wells

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.”
― Dave Barry

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”
― Franz Kafka

“You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”
― Jean M. Auel

“From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ”
― Ray Bradbury

“End with an image and don't explain.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”
― Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

“In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. 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 my job for me."

[Letter to Joan Lancaster, 26 June 1956]”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

“Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
― Edna Ferber

“Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.”
― Stephanie Connolly

“Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.

“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”
― Raymond Chandler

“The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here.”
― Seamus Heaney, Station Island

“Write to your fear.”
― Dorothy Allison

“It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.”
― Don DeLillo

“Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“We write by the light of every story we have ever read. ”
― Richard Peck

“Writing:
It starts at the keyboard,
and it ends at the far corners of the universe. --Paako”
― Vincent Lowry, Constellation Chronicles: The Lost Civilization of Aries

“Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ”
― James Norman Hall

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

“If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.”
― Aaron Sorkin

“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.”
― Tom Wolfe