Best writing & turns Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“In Stratford you either turn into an alcoholic or you better write.”

“Do not beat up on yourself. Do not criticize your writing as lousy, inadequate, stupid, or any of the evil epithets that you are used to heaping on yourself. Such self-bashing is never useful. If you indulge in it, your writing doesn't stand a chance. So when your mind turns on you, turn it back, stamp it down, shut it up, and keep writing.”

Ifs Writing Mind Self Used Turns Evil Chance Stupid Beats Criticize Stamps Indulge Inadequate Indulge In Epithet

Author:Gail Carson Levine

“Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.”

Writing Mean Character Action Turns Reading Imagination Lines Deals Fiction Paradox Fiction Writing

Author:Amy Waldman

“I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book; turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story; characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels.”

Thinking Men Writing Book Character Stories Action Hate Turns Novel Alive Pages Understood Hundred Skins I Hate Twenties Agree Thirty Shed Snakes I Am Alive

Author:Kenneth Patchen

“It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.”

People Ifs Thinking Want Writing Different Ends Might Able Young Turns Results Too Much One Day Mountain Quitting Advise Paralyzed Young Writers Wrong Turn Drivel

Author:Alice Munro

“I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.”

Thinking Men Writing Book Young Turns Men And Women Young Man

Author:Paul Auster

“I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people. When I write a scene I just try to make the characters behave in a way that feels natural to them. Sometimes that means they make a left turn and do something unexpected. Those are always the best scenes in my opinion.”

People Way Feels Writing Trying Mean Real Sometimes Character Turns Left Natural Opinion Scene Surprise Behave Unexpected Something Unexpected

Author:Brad Falchuk

“Country music turns the stuff we say every day into a soundtrack...taking an ordinary working man like me into that rough, happy country of longnecks and short tales.”

Men Writing Country Turns Stuff Ordinary Tales Like Me Rough Songwriting Soundtracks Working Man

Author:Jay Heinrichs

“Acting becomes my real job, writing becomes my second job, and then when I turn 50, I think I'm going to open up an interior decorating company.”

Thinking Writing Real Jobs Turns Acting Company Interiors Real Jobs Decorating Interior Decorating

Author:Ester Dean

“Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.”

Ifs Writing Turns Reading Editing Erase

Author:Horace

“Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. It produces great praise to a lady to spell well. to his daughter Martha”

Ifs Writing Wells Care Remember Turns Produce Daughter Praise Caring Take Care Spells Dictionary Spelling

Book:Jefferson: Political Writings

Source: Jefferson: Political Writings

“But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.”

Source: Kora in Hell: Improvisations

“My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?”

Ifs Writing Mind Book Turns Next Pleasure

Author:Yann Martel

“If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing bsuiness at all.”

Ifs Writing Turns Educational Customers Ads

Book:Communications of an Advertising Man: Selections from the Speeches, Articles, Memoranda, and Miscellaneous Writings of Leo Burnett

Source: Communications of an Advertising Man: Selections from the Speeches, Articles, Memoranda, and Miscellaneous Writings of Leo Burnett

“The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.”

Writing Two Reality Running Turns Choices Energy Fiction Mystery Produce Tired Former Conquer Reality Of Life Complexity Intimidating Two Choices

Book:There Was a Country: A Memoir

Source: There Was a Country: A Memoir

“When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years whether it is being the writer or being the lover turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.”

World Writing Years Humans Ideas Jobs Turns Written Lovers Activity Excitement Fifty Human Activity Unwritten Exuberance

Author:Philip Roth

“All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.”

Writing May Young Turns Literature Teach Written Precocious

Author:Laura Riding

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