Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Favorite Quotes

This is topic Favorite Quotes in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Marzo (Member # 5495) on :

I don't think there's a thread like this going. Let's add quotes to our original posts to keep the thread from getting long, and also so that it's easy to see a collection of someone's favorites all in one place.

Post quotes that help you as a writer, whether they make you cry, "yes!", make you think, or make you laugh. Credit where you can, of course.

"Art strives to answer the question: What is life?"

"In serious fiction, character drives plot."

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." - E.L. Doctorow

"You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work." - William Gibson

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration." - Ernest Hemingway

Posted by annepin (Member # 5952) on :

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." ~Oscar Wilde.

"Writer's block is only a failure of the ego."
~Norman Mailer

"Writing is a hard way to make a living, but a good way to make a life."
~Doris Betts

"The difference between the right word and nearly the right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug."
~Mark Twain.

"One cannot be too scrupulous, too sincere, too submissive before nature... but one ought to be more or less master of one's model."
~ Cezanne

"Let your characters have their way. Let your secret life be lived. Then at your leisure, in the succeeding weeks, months or years, you let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting, you relive it."
~ Ray Bradbury

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
~ William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style

"Character is destiny."
~ Heraclitus

[This message has been edited by annepin (edited February 10, 2008).]

[This message has been edited by annepin (edited February 11, 2008).]

Posted by DebbieKW (Member # 5058) on :

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." -- G.K. Chesterton

On feeling discouraged:

"Just because the voices speak to you from within doesn't mean they speak the truth." -- Nancy Lamb

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Mark Twain:

quote:
Don't say "The old lady screamed." Bring her on and let her scream.

Posted by rstegman (Member # 3233) on :

"if you write, you are a writer.
If you are not talented, you will not get published as often, or at all"
- Orson Scott Card.

based on this,
"Me are a writer."