Elinor > Elinor's Quotes

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

“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

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

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

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

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
― Neil Gaiman

“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

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

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman

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

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

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

“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien

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

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

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso