Dan Richter > Dan'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 nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

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

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

“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

“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

“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...”
― Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”
― George R.R. Martin

“A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddle with a book, changing little thing after little thing.”
― Kimberly Pauley

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy