Saturday 16 February 2013

Wise Words About Writing


Some Writers Say: 

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there. H.G. Wells


Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. Mark Twain

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. W. Somerset Maugham

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. E.L. Doctorow

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.  Kahlil Gibran

Art is not a handicraft.  It is the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced. Leo Tolstoy
 Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer. John O'Hara
So many writers...

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 most. Read! William Faulkner

I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Louis L'Amour

I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. Kurt Vonnegut

 There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. Doris Lessing

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea. Thomas Mann

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.  Tom Clancy

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

 "I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there." H.G. Wells

© Wendy Robertson


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