Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relationships. Often they're drunks. And writing–good writing–does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder–so that eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death, the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying–and often drives us mad. So if you're not a writer, consider yourself fortunate. Samuel R. Delany
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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Gustave Flaubert
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
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Chuck Palahniuk
In order to write about life first you must live it.
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Ernest Hemingway
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can...
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Stephen Fry
More Quotes By Samuel R. Delany
You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to...
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such...
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.
I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write,...
You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.
