David Bishop > David's Quotes

“The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
― Mark Twain

“If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“It is the tale, not he who tells it.”
― Stephen King

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”
― H.G. Wells

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”
― Mark Twain

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
― Jules Renard

“What is your advice to young writers?”
“Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.”
― Craig Claiborne

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.”
― Stephen King

“The desire to write grows with writing.”
― Erasmus

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.”
― Emil Ludwig

“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”
― Stephen King

“If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Inspiration comes of working every day.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.”
― J.K. Rowling

“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
― George Orwell

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft