Martin Wilsey: August 2019

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Quotes of the Week

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.
—Jessamyn West

Every little detail you can smuggle with you into your fiction makes your world more real to your reader.
—Neil Gaiman

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.
—David Foster Wallace

To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.
—William Zinsser

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finished the book.
—Roald Dahl

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
—Catherine Drinker Bowen

Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.
—James Alexander Thom

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
—Barbara Kingsolver

You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.
—Marie de Nervaud

Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.
—George Singleton

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
—Ray Bradbury