The only difference between a writer and someone who
wants to be a writer is discipline. ~ Ayelet Waldman
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were
temporary setbacks. ~ Dottie Walters
If you can imagine it, You can achieve it. If you can
dream it, You can become it. ~ William Arthur Ward
The image that fiction presents is purged of the
distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life. ~
Robert Penn Warren
There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a
sufficiently talented writer can't get a good story out of
it. ~ Lawrence Watt-Evans
Most writers in the course of their careers become
thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in
any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a
healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise. ~ Evelyn
Waugh
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from
which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable
vulgarity. ~ Evelyn Waugh
Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves.
~ C. Astrid Weber
I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write
a story just because I want to; not because someone's told
me to. ~ Fay Weldon
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a
typewriter and open a vein. ~ Walter Wellesley "Red"
Smith
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to
alter someone else's draft. ~ H.G. Wells
I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as
straight as I can, because that is the best way to get
there. ~ H.G. Wells
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary
ambitions without systematic knowledge. ~ H.G. Wells
Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I
suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of
yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a
person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his
own right another human being on the page. ~ Eudora
Welty
To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a
story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first
step, and his last too, I suppose. ~ Eudora Welty
There’s still a strange moment with every book when I
move from the position of writer to the position of reader
and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold
public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d
gotten sunburned. ~ Eudora Welty
Dialogue has to show not only something about the
speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe
something about the speaker that he doesn’t know but the
other character does know. ~ Eudora Welty
What we know about writing the novel is the novel. ~
Eudora Welty
What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she
invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived
to make critics out of the chips that were left! ~ Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jnr
One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the
saddle again, at every parenthesis. ~ Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Sr.
In a longish life as a professional writer, I have
heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars,
restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of
them in print. Books must be written, not talked. ~ Morris
L. West
It's an adrenaline surge rushing through your body. You
have this spark of an idea that keeps threatening to burst
into flames and you have to get the words out on paper to
match this emotion or picture in your head. After this
comes the work of cleaning up the mess that you made. ~
Janet West
Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely
essential. ~ Jessamyn West
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and
society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be
alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to
sustain and complete an undertaking. ~ Jessamyn West
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths
as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various
as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world,
and of craft. ~ Jessamyn West
Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget
publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your
machine and get lost in your subject. ~ E. B. White
Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White
The best writing is rewriting. ~ E. B. White
I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at
all. ~ E. B. White
Writing is hard work and bad for the health. ~ E. B.
White
In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not
awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the
breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the
speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The
best test for locating an attributive is to speak the
sentence aloud. ~ E.B. White
I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was
to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you
can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain
conceit. ~ E.B. White
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the
reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. ~
E. B. White
There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no
infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a
person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no
key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the
young writer may steer his course. He will often find
himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.
~ E. B. White
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste,
judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like
getting across the street. ~ E.B. White
Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself
what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because
what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~
Harold Whitman
You must want to enough. Enough to take all the
rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and
discouragement while you are learning. ~ Phyllis
Whitney
Language is not simply a reporting device for
experience but a defining framework for it. ~ Benjamin
Whorf
There is a difference between a book of two hundred
pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred
pages which is the result of an original eight hundred
pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
~ Elie Wiesel
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy
it, but moulds it to its purpose. ~ Oscar Wilde
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing. ~
Oscar Wilde
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing
an epigram on his tombstone. ~ Oscar Wilde
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent
into my works. ~ Oscar Wilde
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like
excess. ~ Oscar Wilde
Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. ~
Oscar Wilde
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being
called an idea at all. ~ Oscar Wilde
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. ~
Oscar Wilde
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in
the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull
facts under the guise of fiction. ~ Oscar Wilde
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I
put it back in again. ~ Oscar Wilde
Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a
relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the
writer to the reader. It says: "I don’t have to draw you a
picture; a hint will do." ~ George Will
I try to work every day because you have no refuge but
writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness,
a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or
some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge
but writing. ~ Tennessee Williams
I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or
imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made
the characters as real and honest as I could, then no
matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious
would find ways to tie it together -- often doing things
far more complicated and sophisticated than I could with
brute conscious effort. I would have ideas for 'nodes', as
I think of them -- story or character details that have
lots of potential connections to other such nodes -- and
even though I didn't quite understand, I would plunk them
in. Two hundred pages later, everything would back-fit, and
I'd say, "Ah, that's why I wrote that." ~ Tad Williams
One writes to find words’ meanings. ~ Joy Williams
The better work men do is always done under stress and
at great personal cost. ~ William Carlos Williams
Only write from your own passion, your own truth.
That's the only thing you really know about, and anything
else leads you away from the pulse. ~ Marianne
Williamson
Writing came easy--it would only get hard when I got
better at it. ~ Garry Willis
If the sex scene doesn't make you want to do it -
whatever it is they're doing - it hasn't been written
right. ~ Sloan Wilson
A writer’s job is sticking his neck out. ~ Sloan
Wilson
A man who wants time to read and write must let the
grass grow long. ~ Sloan Wilson
The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also
his own most loving admirer and about both he must say
nothing. ~ Angus Wilson
All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery - a
confidence trick, trying to make people believe something
is true that isn't. ~ Angus Wilson
A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the
solar plexus and partly in the head. ~ Ethel Wilson
I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit. ~ P. G.
Wodehouse (...after being asked about his writing
technique)
Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that
it is always something of a shock to him to look back and
realize the heights to which he has climbed. ~ P. G.
Wodehouse
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is
mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and
ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right
deep down into life and not caring a damn. ~ P. G.
Wodehouse
I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go
anywhere or do anything. I just want to write. ~ P. G.
Wodehouse
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that
everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a
thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has
ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the
manuscript one hopes to publish. ~ Thomas Wolfe
By writing an outline you really are writing in a way,
because you’re creating the structure of what you’re going
to do. Once I really know what I’m going to write, I don’t
find the actual writing takes all that long. ~ Tom
Wolfe
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn
how to write the novel that you're writing. ~ Gene
Wolfe
One of the things that draws writers to writing is that
they can get things right that they got wrong in real life
by writing about them. ~ Tobias Wolff
Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really
a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters,
images and language. ~ Hilma Wolitzer
Pay attention to the sound of words. ~ Dave
Wolverton
Characterization is an accident that flows out of
action and dialogue. ~ Jack Woodford
Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more
than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his
business to find it and collect it and communicate it to
the rest of us. ~ Virginia Woolf
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of
his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his
works. ~ Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can't
tell it about other people. ~ Virginia Woolf`
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from
writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in
my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut
or it will fall. ~ Virginia Woolf
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the
creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a
new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more
steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned.
Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending
shape keep one at it more than anything. ~ Virginia
Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is
to write fiction. ~ Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have
minded beyond reason the opinions of others. ~ Virginia
Woolf
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so
slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four
corners. ~ Virginia Woolf
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a
woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs,
or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I
think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed
poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who
wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a
woman. ~ Virginia Woolf
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~
William Wordsworth
I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done. ~
Steven Wright
Wrestling with words gave me my moments of greatest
meaning. ~ Richard Wright
Delicious
Facebook
Google Bookmarks
Reddit
Stumbleupon
Livejournal