Writing

 

"The use of quotation marks does not convert a passage into dialogue." - Arlo Bates

"Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it, only one verb to animate it, only one adjective to qualify it.  It is essential to search for this word, for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and to be satisfied with nothing else." - Flaubert

"Edgar Allan Poe was a great theorist but if you actually apply it to his writings he's about a C student." - Stephen D. Rogers 

"I always think of writing as being a con artist." - Stephen D. Rogers

"Any writer will tell you once a voice comes to you, it can't be changed." -SJ Rozan 

"This novel started as a 700-word piece of flash fiction." - Hugh Lessig.

"Writing a book is cheaper than therapy." - S. A. Cosby

"How did I deal with a bad review?  I stopped reading reviews." - Cara Black

"My first goal is to entertain.  No, that's not true.  My first goal is to break your heart and make you cry."   - Meagen Lucas

"There's nothing better than my next book because the one I am writing now is always crap." - Mike McCrary  

"I wrote this book but in a way the book wrote me.  It was cheaper than therapy." - Shelley Parker-Chan

"Use problematic authors as a motivation to write a better book." -Suzanne Palmer

"How do you write time travel stories?  With a manual typewriter." - Joe Haldeman

"I am addicted to semi-colons. I can hardly write a text message without them." - Mick Herron

 

"I love the time when I've finished a book and no one else has seen it so I can live the lie that it's great." - Jess Lourey
 

"Royalty checks are so often reality checks." - Gil Reavill

"Writing is a constant struggle to avoid cliches – half the battle is striking out stock phrases like 'half the battle.'” -Neil Steinberg

"I write to find out what I'm thinking." - David Gerrold

"My work tends to lose something in the original." - James Thurber

"Weak writing shows up early and stays late." - Steve Liskow

"Writing a series about a lot of characters is like there's already a ghost novel waiting." - Mick Herron

"Hey, I’m no goody-two-shoes. I deliberately put one semi-colon in each of my novels. Just because some people say not to." -Jan Christensen

"Thinking about writing isn’t writing.  (Barely qualifies as thinking.)"   -FredFitch 

"When you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end.  We writers do most of our lying in those spaces." -Anton Chekhov

"When I originally wrote that novel I had a main character who I fired.  We had a labor dispute." - Benjamin Rosenbaum 

"Before you can write anything, you have to notice something." - John Irving

"I can bang a short story out in eighteen months." - Kate Thornton 

"A first draft is crap by definition." -Laurie R. King 

"Underlings are people who don't italicize." - Michael Bracken

"So many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence." - Flannery O'Connor

"Truth is shorter than fiction." -- Irving Cohen

"I had to cut 65,000 words before I could start editing." - Robin Yocum

"If you want to write you sit down and write.  There's no plumber's block." - Alan Orloff

"A lot of people ask if  I alienate readers by putting social issues in my books.  I say, that depends on whether you consider being Black a social issue.  I just consider it my skin."  - Danny Gardner

"In a short story the destination is the destination." - James Lincoln Warren

"Give your reader a reason to want to know what you're telling them." - Janet Hutchings

"The idea of  a story is that you tell a series of lies that tell some kind of truth." - Johnny Shaw 

"You can always fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages."  - Harlan Coben

"The story has to move down, as well as forward."  -Rachel Basch

"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t." -Josh Olson 

"But far better to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” -Katherine Mansfield

"I write fantasy because I like doing the research."- Karen McCullough

"While writing my novel in the library I felt a strange kinship to the man at the next desk who was talking to fictional characters."  -John Hart

"You are everybody in your book."  -Don Bruns

"Writing a short story is a tightrope walk.  The craft is getting from one end to the other.  The art is doing a backflip in the middle."  - C.C. Finlay

"The literary market does not believe in money.  At least, not for you." - Mir Plemmons.

"A short story needs to have one point and your reader needs to get it right through the heart." - Kate Thornton

"There's no platonic ideal of story."  -C.C. Finlay

"Every other writer's process is sort of vaguely scary and appalling." - Daryl Gregory.

"Style is what the writer does.  Genre is what the marketing department does."  - Richard Vadry