You Said It: 15 Quotes on Writing

I noticed, recently, that I’ve amassed a little collection of quotes about writing. They hang around my hard-drive, in old Word documents and sticky notes, little reminders of what I’d doing, what I want to be doing, and how much better at it other people have been at it than I will ever be. I want to share these fifteen tidbits with you, in the hopes that they can encourage, inspire, and amuse you-- and, if you're anything like me, make you depressed because you can't sum life up this perfectly.

1. "We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action" —Frank Tibolt

2. "Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them."—  Carlos Fuentes

3. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed" — Earnest Hemingway

4. "Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love." — Ray Bradbury

5. "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." — Douglas Adams

6. "Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either." — Meg Cabot

7. "I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of."  — Joss Whedon

8. "This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard." — Neil Gaiman

9. "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."  — E.L. Doctorow

10. "Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning:  I wanted to know what I was going to say." —  Sharon O'Brien

11. "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."  —Mark Twain

12. "The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it." —Jules Renard,

13. "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster."  —Isaac Asimov

14. "Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material." —John Steinbeck (This is what I'm doing right now with my YA sci-fi novel, and it's killing me... but it's also making me get the work done!)

15. "Beware of advice--even this." --Carl Sandburg 

I think that last quote is the most important piece of advice for any writer. The literary world is chock full of snobs and sticklers who will insist that writing is this thing or has to be done that way, and anything else is trash. It's practically a hallmark of your own talent to be down on other people; it seems like any aspiring writer who wants to be taken seriously takes great pride in hating the Twilight series, or accusing The Hunger Games of being a cheap knock-off of Battle Royale, or hating on Romance novels, or whatever it is this week that will prove you're a "good" writer because you hate it. (Breathe, Emily. Put a period in there somewhere.) Now, I'm not above this-- I rag on Twilight plenty-- but the point is that in your own journey, you can't listen too hard to any of this. What worked for one person may not work for another. What was true for one person may turn out to be a bunch of hooey for another. This isn't to say that you can throw out constructive criticism because it is crushing your pwecious widdle artistic feewings--if you can't take criticism, and learn from it, then your writing will never get any better. What I am saying, though, is that you have to follow your own vision, your own calling, your own methods; no two authors write in exactly the same way, and isn't that wonderful? Isn't that the point?

One last quote, completely unrelated to writing, that I just love too much to leave out:

"Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination." —Marcel Proust

What’s your favorite quote on writing, or any type of creative pursuit? Let me know!