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Quotes

'Books are comforting, maybe especially when you're growing up, because reading a story that has a main character you can identify with, and - crucially - an ending you already know, is cathartic.'

— Gal Beckerman

‘To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.'

— Mark Twain

‘You don't choose the books, the books choose you. The best novel you can write at any given moment will be the one that's calling your name the loudest.'

— Maggie O’Farrell

‘I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.'

— Terry Pratchett

‘Writing about historical figures is like trying to solve a mystery as you try to figure out who they were and get as close to them as you can without ever really knowing them.'

— Alice Hoffman

'Read More than You Write.If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.'

— Stephen King

‘A really great children's book can hook a child. It can put a fish hook through their imagination and root them in the world of books for the rest of their lives.'

— Katherine Rundell

'There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.'

— Somerset Maugham

'I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it's none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can't wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.'

— Barbara Taylor Bradford

‘Starting with a blank page is part of what makes writing a book so vulnerable. A novel can be anything, and the way it turns out is highly personal.'

— Laura Blackett

‘In a children's book, the child must be the agent. You mustn't take the meat and potatoes of the story away from the child.'

— Michael Rosen

'Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.'

— J K Rowling

'Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.'

— Aldous Huxley

‘If people don't like what I write, I just try to avoid that side of it. I get it. It doesn't bother me at all. I feel like when you have five books on the bestsellers list it's very hard to be upset in any way by criticism. Because you know that people out there are enjoying your work, and I just keep my focus on that.'

— Colleen Hoover

‘I'm interested in the effects of kindness. When I see kindness, I'm greatly moved by it, and I think most people are - they yearn for it. We live in a harsh world. People want to see the possibilities and the healing power of love.'

— Alexander McCall Smith

'Anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the ‘inferior' genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.'

— Ursula K. Le Guin

'There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.'

— Ernest Hemingway

‘You can't be best friends with a dragon in the real world. So writing fantasy is the next best thing. It's the genre where you can explore every impossible thought. It is a whole different mode for exploring life.'

— John Wiswell

'Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.'

— Edna O'Brien

'Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.'

— Ray Bradbury

'Some novels known as the greatest works of literature are crime novels, and some crime novels are great works of literature.'

— Lynne Constantine

'Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.'

— Stephenie Meyer

'I only write when I'm inspired, so I see to it that I'm inspired every morning at nine o'clock.'

— Peter De Vries

'Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.'

— Alice Munro

'The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.'

— Stephen King

‘I never really think of children when I do my books. Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in a corner of my mind. I write it for myself.'

— Laurent de Brunhoff

'Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.'

— Barbara Kingsolver

'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.' 

— Dan Magers

'The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.'

— Stephen Fry

'The importance of developing a daily writing habit cannot be overstated. Even if you can only spare twenty minutes daily, consistent writing is the key to honing your skills, overcoming writer's block, and unlocking your creative potential.'

— Keidi Keating

'You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, "This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer."'

— David Morrell

'And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.'

— Sylvia Plath

'To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.'

— Lawrence Clark Powell

'Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.'

— Paula Danziger

'Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.'

— Anon

'Your job is to make your novel the best of its kind that it can be.'

— Margaret Atwood

'A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.'

— Richard Bach

'[As a writer] you have to have the three D's: drive, discipline and desire. If you're missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it's going to be really hard to get anything done.'

— Nora Roberts

'Every writer I know has trouble writing.'

— Joseph Heller

'Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.'

— Chang-Rae Lee
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