Monday, August 5, 2013

Writing Quotes Again... err... Part 2?

Since I don't have a guest for today, I thought I'd share the next round of writerly quotes from my quote database. 

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot. - L. Sprague deCamp

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. - Philip K. Dick

This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it. - Eeyore

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. - Unknown English Professor

There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up. - Raymond Feist

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. - Gustave Flaubert

There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world. - John Fowles

I'm putting all this down in my memoirs, so if I grow up twisted and warped, the world will know why. - From Brighton Beach Memoirs

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market. - Robert Frost

Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter. - Neil Gaiman

It’s a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. - Erle Stanley Gardner

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing. - Melinda Haynes

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up. - Ernest Hemingway

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it. - Ernest Hemingway

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. - Ernest Hemingway


Today was D-H - because I just have that many writerly quotes (growing all the time, too).  I realize today's quotes were pretty tongue-in-cheek and snarky.  That's just the way the alphabet fell - and how my mind must've been working the day I chose which quotes to add to the database. 

We'll see what next time brings (which could be next week if I don't get off my buns and find a guest for Monday).

3 comments:

  1. Excellent quotes, B.E. - thanks for sharing :)

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  2. Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter. - Neil Gaiman

    This! Every writer needs to tattoo this on their forehead so they see it every time they look in the mirror!

    Have you considered getting a pre-published writer to do a blog from their prospective?

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  3. Yeah, I like that quote a lot, Silver. And I have had unpublished writers do guest posts (Janet, Natalie, Alexia...), but it's been a while.

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