If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind and hang in there.
– Mary McGrory
Category: Quotable
Quotable 195
That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Quotable 194
You never know what you will learn ’til you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
– Anita Brookner
Quotable 193
My principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open.
– William S. Burroughs
Quotable 192
A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.
– Dean Koontz
Quotable 191
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
– Terry Pratchett
Quotable 190
First and foremost, you have to make the movie for yourself. And that’s not to say, to hell with everyone else, but what else have you got to go on but your own taste and judgment?
– Harold Ramis (November 21, 1944 – February 24, 2014)
Quotable 189
I never started from ideas but always from character.
– Ivan Turgenev
Quotable 188
Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.
– Ann Beattie
Quotable 187
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
– Vaclav Havel