Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Creeley

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

Richard Paul Evans

Don't try to write what other people are writing - write what is true to you.

Rebecca West

I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.

Rebecca West

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

Russell Lynes

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

Russell Banks

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

Russell Banks

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

Russell Banks

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

Roger Babson

The God we worship writes his name upon our faces.

Roald Dahl

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman.

W. H. Auden

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

Robert Johnson

Blues fallin' down like hail And the day keeps on worryin' me There's a hell hound on my trail.

Saint Augustine

Hell was made for the inquisitive.

Winston Churchill

If you are going through hell just keep going

Zell Miller

I see one-third of a nation and it can go to hell.

Rob Longo

I hope people come to watch, but I'd be racing if there were nobody here. I just get out there and run the hell out of it.

Don Herold

The road to hell is thick with taxicabs

Oliver Stone

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

William Golding

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

Jojo Moyes

Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.

Sarah Waters

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished: the sex novel is now normal.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

Philipp Meyer

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

Terry Pratchett

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

Joyce Carol Oates

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Alexander McCall Smith

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.