Quotes of the Week

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
    - Stephen King

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
    - Ernest Hemingway

It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
    - Ernest Hemingway

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
    - Mark Twain

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
    - William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
    - Somerset Maugham

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
    - Herman Melville

It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
    - C. J. Cherryh

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
    - Robert Benchley

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
    - Ray Bradbury

A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.
    - Sidney Sheldon

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
    - Henry David Thoreau

If you have other things in your life—family, friends, good productive day work—these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.
    - David Brin

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
    - Anton Chekhov