Writing-advice Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Category: writing-advice
Quotes of Category: writing-advice

Bill Bryson _ Bryson's Dictionary of
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
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Khaled Hosseini _ The Kite Runner
about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.
book-quote writing-advice
Jeffrey Eugenides _ The Marriage Plot
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
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Steven Pressfield _ The War of Art: Break Through
Next morning I went over to Paul's for coffee and told him I had finished. "Good for you," he said without looking up. "Start the next one today.
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Anne Lamott _ Bird by Bird: Some
Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can.
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Anne Lamott _ Bird by Bird: Some
I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you've read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone's soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of -- please forgive me -- wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
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Anne Lamott _ Bird by Bird: Some
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
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Anne Lamott _ Bird by Bird: Some
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act-truth is always subversive.
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Annie Dillard _ The Writing Life
Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
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Annie Dillard _ The Writing Life
If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
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Vladimir Nabokov _ The Stories of Vladimir
Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart."
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George Eliot _ Middlemarch
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
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