More on writing from the Masters...
It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story.
(Frank Yerby)
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.
(Roger Zelazny)
If you stop thinking about *trying to write*, and just write...the way you have to stop thinking about the next step you make, and just *dance*...the way you have to forget about technique and just make love...it all comes together. You don't Try To Write. You just write.
(jms)
There's a little of lots of things in the writing, it's hard to pin down any one of them; I don't sit down and say, "Okay, now to use some psychology on this." A writer is like a sponge; you pick up lots of colors and strangenesses, then when you come to write something, you squeeze, and everything comes out together. I write what the dark and scary parts of my brain seem interested in writing about.
(jms)
The secret of writing: get your character up a tree and throw rocks at him. I throw big rocks.
(jms)
Of course everything has already been said, but since no one was listening, we must begin again.
(unknown)
All you need to know is who your character is, what he wants, how far he will go to get it, and how far somebody else will go to stop him. The rest follows naturally.
(jms)
People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
(Virginia Woolf)
"The phone rings. I am not amused. This is not my favourite way to wake up. My favourite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This happens rather less often than one might wish."
(Fran Lebowitz)
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
(Arthur C Clarke)
"Normal people just don't feel impelled to write."
(E. Bergler, psychoanalyst)
A verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.
(Mark Twain)