I like other people's words.
Now to share some of my favorite bits of other people's words, particularly related to the topic of writing.
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| "Quoth the raven, nevermore." -- Edgar Allen Poe, "The Raven" image: a single robust black raven sitting on a red rock with blurred landscape and dim blue sky in the background. |
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other
people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg
“Write every day.
When you write every day, it becomes a habit and you do it automatically.
Habits are things you get for free.” Cory Doctorow
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays,
stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically
explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my
life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early
and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get
out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.” Ray Bradbury
“When you’re slammed, your novel becomes a refuge from the
chaos of the rest of your life—a secret world you get to escape to at the end
of a long day.” Chris Baty
“Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.” Johnathon Franzen
“A word after a word after a word is power.” Margaret Atwood
“I do not
over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the
damned story.” Tom Clancy
“I think all
writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
“For your
born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the
right word.” Catherine Drinker Bowen
“To defend
what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.” William Zinsser
“Creativity
is an act of defiance.” Twyla Tharp
“I cannot
remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so,
they have made me.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We read to
know we are not alone.” William Nicholson
“A person
who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.” Mark Twain
“Reading is
a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler
I have more tucked away and folded into my calendar(s) to fall out on a surprise day when I may need a reminder of what I am doing and why. Shortly, I will make an effort to go through and accumulate then curate those for you as well.
You may have noticed that last few quotes were more about reading than writing. With this keen observation in mind I ask you to remember, writers read, writers read a lot, and therefore when talking and thinking about writing we should never forget to talk and think and write about reading.
