You don’t know what you’re going to write until you start, and you can’t start until you know.
– Tom Stoppard
Category: Quotable
Quotable 305
To have a beautiful written style is always nice.
But to have a damn good story is essential.
– Joanne Harris
Quotable 304
I revise toward clarity and away from difficulty,
wanting the poem to appear to be written with ease.
– Ted
Kooser
Quotable 303
Men love women. It’s not an original idea. But
if you somehow write a terrific novel about it, then by a literary
sleight of hand it becomes absolutely original.
– Umberto Eco
Quotable 302
Finish the damn book. Nothing else matters. Stop
second-guessing yourself and write it through to the end. You don’t
know what you have until you’ve finished it. You don’t know how
to fix it until it’s all down on the page.
– Lauren Beukes
Quotable 301
Craft is what enables you to be successful when you’re not inspired.
– Brian Eno
Quotable 300
The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.
– Pete Seeger
Quotable 299
When boys don’t read stories with strong, smart, or otherwise incredible women, it seeps into their brains that these women don’t exist. When they are not taught that they can look up to women, they don’t. This is poisonous to society.
– Jeremy Whitley
Quotable 298
The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational. Whenever you create a character you must allow for the existence of irrationality.
– Rita Mae Brown
Quotable 297
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
– John Steinbeck