#writ

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity. Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves. ↗

— Ruskin Bond

#style

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#writing #writing-advice #true

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#true

With writing, we have second chances. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#chance

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." (Casual Chance, 1964) ↗

— Colette

#editing #self-criticism #writing #chance

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. ↗

— Stephen King

#positive-thinking #self-empowerment #writing #think

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#canon #literature #writing #art

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined. ↗

— Charles Nodier

#fantastic #fantasy #genre #horror #supernatural

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities. ↗

— Glen Duncan

#art

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species. ↗

— Machado de Assis

#creativity #literature #novels #writers #writing