Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Gillian Flynn

Quote by Gillian Flynn

“There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.”

Quote by Gillian Flynn

Create image

Author

Gillian Flynn
Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn is an American author known for her suspense novels. Her works are characterized by complex characters and tense plots, with her most famous novel being 'Gone Girl'. more

You May Also Like

“The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.”

MenFirstsIdeasPlaySeemsFacesProcessVisionCasesYouthHe ManLateSittingWindowChairsVagueMoonlightAll AloneStood UpDesolateStreamingApparitionsMenagerieSitting In A Chair
Author:Tennessee Williams
Create image

“What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.”

WritingTryingPlayPowerfulEffectsStrangeInvolvedCookingSentencesChemicalsAssociationDay To DayGunpowderPlay Writing
Author:Wallace Shawn
Create image

“The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.”

WritingMeanDoeArtBookStoriesFormHumanityFightingLostLanguageBornPowerfulNovelCenturyMovementPaintingSpeciesRelatedComplexityMost PowerfulTrendsRhymeContinuitySingularityPowerful Words
Author:Pat Conroy
Create image

“My idea of storytelling is - I wouldn't say it's religious but I would say it's spiritual. You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he couldn't do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and they said, 'Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.' And he said, 'Visions come to prepared spirits.' The way Billy Wilder put it was 'The muse has to know where to find you.'”

KnowsWayTryingYearsSaidIdeasSpiritualSpiritNightReligiousSleepVisionFiguresStudentsWake UpTwentiesStructurePreparedRingsStorytellingTailsMuseThey SaidSnakesOne NightGoing To SleepAugustChemistSwallowingWilderBenzene
Author:David Milch
Create image

“I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.”

WritingYearsMindBelieveTwoEndsMatterDoneChanceNovelTeacherPagesArgumentNo Matter WhatPreparedPaceFavourMarathonDays OffSprintStanfordPace Yourself
Author:Scott Turow
Create image

“I imagine you will always be pinched for money, for time, for a place to work. But I think you will do it. And believe me, it is not a new problem. You are in good company...Your touch is the uncommon touch; you will speak only to the thoughtful reader. And more times than once you will ask yourself whether such readers really exist at all and why you should go on projecting your words into silence like an old crazy actor playing the part of himself to an empty theater.”

ThinkingShouldBelieveProblemActorsAsksSpeakSilenceCompanyImagineCrazyGoes OnReaderEmptyTheaterThoughtfulMore TimeBelieve In MeUncommonGood Company
Author:Wallace Stegner
Create image