Angie > Angie's Quotes

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

“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

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

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

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

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

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“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

“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”
― Harvey Pekar

“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

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

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
― Sharon Olds

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

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

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

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

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

“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”
― Richard Price

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending.”
― Julia Quinn

“some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.”
― Charles Bukowski, War All the Time: Poems 1981 - 1984

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts