mariacallas
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2004
- Messages
- 23,781
I've amassed quite a collection of writing quotes....here are a few that are too beautiful to not share 
"If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless." -- Bruce Sterling
"[Writing is] fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads." -- Stanley Elkin
"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different." -- Neil Gaiman
"The writer trusts nothing he writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in his head." --Joy Williams
"The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger." -- Pico Iyer
"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out." -Ray Bradbury
"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art." -- Jorge Luis Borges, from Twenty Conversations with Borges
"Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself." -- Harlan Ellison
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." -- Raymond Chandler
"If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless." -- Bruce Sterling
"[Writing is] fine, precise, detailed work, the infinitely small motor management of diamond cutters and safecrackers that we do in our heads." -- Stanley Elkin
"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different." -- Neil Gaiman
"The writer trusts nothing he writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in his head." --Joy Williams
"The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger." -- Pico Iyer
"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out." -Ray Bradbury
"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art." -- Jorge Luis Borges, from Twenty Conversations with Borges
"Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself." -- Harlan Ellison
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." -- Raymond Chandler
