#writ

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#fiction #on-fiction #stories #writing #broken

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

#writing-advice #wonder

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#plath #sylvia #writing #wrong

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#control #writing #addiction

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#writing #artists

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#writing #success

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. ↗

— Stephen King

#words #writing #words

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#words

Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#thought-experiments #writing-craft #experience

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer--such as it is--is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author's childhood. A writer's childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience. Writers read literary biography, and surround themselves with other writers, deliberately to enforce in themselves the ludicrous notion that a reasonable option for occupying yourself on the planet until your life span plays itself out is sitting in a small room for the duration, in the company of pieces of paper. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#experience