Gillian > Gillian's Quotes

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
― Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories

“Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.”
― Maya Deren

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“It's a lie to feel any war is far away.”
― Michelle Detorie

“The easiest lies to tell are the ones you want to be true.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“Mine. The language of love is like that, possessive. That should be the first warning that it's not going to encourage anyone's betterment.”
― Holly Black, Black Heart

“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings

“Isn't that what stories do, make real things fake, and fake things real?”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Curse

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

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

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

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“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

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

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

“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To survive, you must tell stories.”
― Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

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

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

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

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
― Emily Dickinson

“If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.”
― Martin Luther

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Don't get it right, get it written.”
― Ally Carter

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”
― Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
― Adrienne Rich

“You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin