Writing Quotes

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic memoirs...

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

Write the book you want to read.

Writing is 1% inspiration, 99% not getting distracted by the Internet

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

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.

Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial 'we'.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.

There is nothing magical about how you get from the middle of a book to the end of one.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at work is writing good fiction.

'...there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.'
'Where?'
'In the 'word-memory' section,' he said, epexegetically.

If you need to tell your readers something... there are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it's plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she's handy.

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.

"Enchantment's in bookstores on Tues?" "No, it's already there. I've already given birth."

I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, "Verify your quotations."