Quotes about Writing L

• No one is able to enjoy such feast than the one who throws a party in his own mind. ~ Selma Lagerlöf

• A year from now you'll wish you had started today. ~ Karen Lamb
  
• Plot springs from character... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type. ~ Anne Lamott
  
• In general...there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. ~ -Anne Lamott
  
• We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. ~ Anne Lamott
  
• I took a number of stories by popular writers as well as others by Maupassant, O. Henry, Stevenson, etc., and studied them carefully. Modifying what I learned over the next few years, I began to sell. ~ Louis L'Amour

• A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. ~ Ring Lardner
  
• Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. ~ Philip Larkin
  
• Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. ~ Philip Larkin
  
• Authors who never give you something to disagree with never give you anything to think about. ~ Michael LaRocca
  
• If you're a writer, you want to get your soul out there, where people can look at it. ~ Jeremy Larner
  
• If I'm trying to sleep, the ideas won't stop. If I'm trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness. ~ Carrie Latet
  
• Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur. ~ Carrie Latet
  
• Writing is a product of silence. ~ Carrie Latet
  
• Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity. ~ Natalia Laurila

• Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave. ~ Marc Lawrence
  
• I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze. ~ D. H. Lawrence
  
• Often I'll find clues to where the story might go by figuring out where the characters would rather not go. ~ Doug Lawson
  
• Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire. ~ Reggie Leach
  
• In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm. ~ Fran Lebowitz
  
• Screenwriting is not an artform, it is a punishment from God. ~ Fran Lebowitz
  
• Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks - chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write. ~ Fran Lebowitz
  
• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end. ~ Ursula K. LeGuin

• Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• Do remember, though, that unless you’re a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn’t what you want; it’s only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there’s nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• What’s needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people’s voices. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• If you’re a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don’t censor, don’t control. Listen, and write. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it. ~ Ursula K. LeGuin

• Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds. ~ Ursula Le Guin
  
• Sure, it's simple, writing for kids… Just as simple as bringing them up. ~ Ursula K. LeGuin
  
• The story is not in the plot but in the telling. ~ Ursula K. LeGuin
  
• If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. ~ - Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. ~ - Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing. ~ Ursula K. LeGuin

• You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer. ~ Stephen Leigh
  
• That's the essential goal of the writer: you slice out a piece of yourself and slap it down on the desk in front of you. You try to put it on paper, try to describe it in a way that the reader can see and feel and touch. You paste all your nerve endings into it and then give it out to strangers who don't know you or understand you. And you will feel everything that happens to that story -- if they like it, if they hate it. Because no matter how you try to distance yourself from it, to some degree you feel that if they hate it, they hate you. Which isn't the truth, you understand. At least you understand that in your head...but not always in your heart. ~ Stephen Leigh
  
• I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~ Elmore Leonard
  
• All the information you need can be given in dialogue. ~ Elmore Leonard
  
• And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.’ ~ Doris Lessing

• In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better. ~ Doris Lessing
  
• There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. ~ Doris Lessing
  
• I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. ~ Doris Lessing
  
• One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language. ~ Denise Levertov
  
• A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. ~ C.S. Lewis
  
• Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me." ~ C. S. Lewis
  
• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. ~ C. S. Lewis
  
• It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~ Sinclair Lewis

• Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about...) ~ C S Lewis
  
• Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. ~ Sinclair Lewis
  
• Writing is just work - there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes - it is still just work. ~ Sinclair Lewis
  
• Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits. ~ G. C. Lichtenberg
  
• The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer. ~ - G. C. Lichtenberg
  
• An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women. ~ Alain de Lille
  
• I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire. ~ Gordon Lish
  
• So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with. ~ John Locke

• You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~ Jack London
  
• I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. ~ Jack London
  
• Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. ~ Longfellow
  
• The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well and doing well whatever you do. ~ Longfellow
  
• I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain. ~ Audre Lorde
  
• I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. ~ Audre Lorde

• At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night. ~ H. P. Lovecraft
  
• When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can sure it but the scratching of a pen. ~ Samuel Lover
  
• In fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself. . . . the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement. ~ Percy Lubbock
  
• Many different substances, as distinct to the practiced eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a novel, and it is necessary to see them for what they are. ~ Percy Lubbock
  
• Success is that old ABC--ability, breaks, and courage. ~ Charles Luckman
  
• Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it. ~ Russel Lynes
  
• No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~ Russell Lynes

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