How To Write Quotes

“But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?"
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving.”
― Roman Payne

“Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“A writer is never alone, he is always with himself”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it.

But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to live a footprint in the sands of history when giants are passing through the same sands unless you are one of the giants”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Books used to be written by humanity's greatest thinkers, or at least our greatest entertainers. Now every halfwit can publish his verbal diarrhea. And millions of shitty, mediocre, uninspired, trite books are drowning out mankind's greatest literary accomplishments.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“Pro tip: If you can't think of anything more interesting to post on social media than a picture of your cup of coffee, you are boring and you have nothing interesting to say.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“Conformists are boring. Artists are interesting. That's the difference between a wannabe writer and a real writer.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“If you have writer’s block, write about having writer’s block, and you will no longer have it.”
― Bashar

“The difference between some random toddler scribbling some crappy drawing and Leonardo da Vinci is that Leonardo has talent. Someone with no talent is not the same as someone with talent.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“If someone with talent creates something, it's art. When someone with no talent creates something, it's crap.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“If you want to be a good writer, you need to be a talented artist. And artists are unique and stand out. Artists are the opposite of conformists.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“If you want to be a good writer, you need to be a talented artist. And artists are unique and stand out. Artists are the opposite of conformists. So by doing what everyone else is doing, you're proving your mediocrity, and your lack of artistic uniqueness. When you follow everyone else's example, you are by definition not an artist. You're a copy cat.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“Not every self-published indie author is bad. There actually are some very good ones. But they're the exception, not the rule.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“Shakespeare was one in a million. That makes you pretty unique, if there's only one million people.

But when there's a hundred million people, then being one in a million means there are 100 people just as talented as you.

In a country of 300 million people, there are 300 people like you. And in a world of seven billion people, you're competing with 7000 other people who are every bit as good as you. I wonder if Shakespeare would have gotten famous if he lived today, and had to compete with 7000 other Shakespeares.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. But if there's a shirtless guy on your cover, or your title includes the words billionaire, alpha-male, werewolf or werebear, your "book" is probably a pile of unimaginative, derivative drivel devoid of a single original thought. Yet another poorly written romance clone the world didn't need.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance

“The Tao of writing..

Write only for the joy of writing
which then become a joy to read...”
― Leland Lewis, Random Molecular Mirroring

“Everyone has a book in them!
You have a book in you.
Write it!”
― Adebola Adisa, How to Write Your Book 101; Everyone Has a Book in Them!

“She takes up the brush, dips it, and, on the same piece of paper, executes the first stroke. "Do not think about the character you're making. Only think about the line, the single movement. It's like a dance, ne? If you concentrate too much on the final steps, you will miss the present ones." Another stroke, one more, and she has completed the pictograph. It is beautiful, worthy of being on a wall, and I say so.
She shakes her head. "I still have much to learn, but it is passable. It doesn't have to be perfect, however. Kanji is an expression of the soul.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax.
My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results.
I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’.
—Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home: A Memoir

“On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?’ I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now.
My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the prestigious things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.
As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything—I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life.”
—Chapter XI, “Intellectual Equipment”, page 297”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home