Quotes of the week

A collection of the Quotes of the Week:

March 27, 2013
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountaintop, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten--happy, absorbed, and quietly putting on one bead after another.

--Brenda Ueland

April 3, 2013

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do--you can either type or kill yourself."...For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

--Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird

April 10, 2013

Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

--Samuel Clemens

April 17, 2013

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

--Ernest Hemingway

April 22, 2013

I am not saying students should write sloppily or they should write ungrammatically, but you don't hear Oprah gushing, "We chose this book because of its neat margins." Or "This is a fine novel, with not one misspelled word."

--Barry Lane

May 3, 2013
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

--Jack London

May 7, 2013

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

--Stephen King