It's okay to quote smart people if it isn't from book you haven't read. I'm going through some of these, about writing, and i love them. my favorite will of course always be by Adams: I love deadlines - I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by...
Here's one by Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
Twain: “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Saul Bellow: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
H. S. Thompson: “Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.”
King, obviously: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Camus: “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
London: “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Melville: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”
Somerset M. : “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
Hawthorne: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
The Atwood woman, interesting: “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
Bukowski, the dick: “Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it.”
Nabokov: “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
James Baldwin, only black dude I could find on the list: “Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success."
Here's one by Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
Twain: “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Saul Bellow: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
H. S. Thompson: “Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over.”
King, obviously: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Camus: “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
London: “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Melville: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”
Somerset M. : “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
Hawthorne: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
The Atwood woman, interesting: “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
Bukowski, the dick: “Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it.”
Nabokov: “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
James Baldwin, only black dude I could find on the list: “Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success."
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