Vivian > Vivian's Quotes

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

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

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“You can’t put a price tag on love. But if you could, I’d wait for it to go on sale.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

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

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“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

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

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

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

“I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.”
― Jarod Kintz, I Want

“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 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

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

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

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Laughter is the sound of the soul dancing. My soul probably looks like Fred Astaire.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“I’m not waiting until my hair turns white to become patient and wise. Nope, I’m dyeing my hair tonight.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“I want to gather up all the ink cartridges in the universe, because somewhere, mixed in with all that ink, is the next great American novel. And I’d love nothing more than to drink it.”
― Jarod Kintz, I Want Two apply for a job at our country's largest funeral home, and then wear a suit and noose to the job interview.

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

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”
― Joss Whedon

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

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham