It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
– Vita Sackville-West
Category: Quotable
Quotable 54
The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just “What if” – it’s “My God; what if” – in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.
– Philip K. Dick
Quotable 53
“Being a writer” is itself a weird idea, really, as though there exists a permanent state of glorious writerliness, when in fact writing is not a state of being, but an art, a craft, a set of technical skills.
– Kate Pullinger
Quotable 52
It’s perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
– C.J. Cherryh
Quotable 51
In a good play, everyone is in the right.
– Fredrich Hebbel
Quotable 50
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
Quotable 49
There are many reasons why novelists write — but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.
– John Fowles
Quotable 48
Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn; but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and experience.
– August Wilhelm von Schlegel
Quotable 47
Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books?
– Peter Ackroyd
Quotable 46
All the questions and choices of technique can overwhelm a writer. The only way that most of us get any writing done is not by thinking of technique, but by actively daydreaming the lives and actions of our characters and writing down what happens.
– Bruce Holland Rogers