Storytelling is no different from gossip -- we want to know what happens. The joke or story, and the way it's told, are important . . . but we want to know what happens. And the payoff should be unexpected and satisfying. And, more importantly for the writer, one should know that punch line as one is writing.
The Western genre often employs a sense of mythic dimension.
fourth wall: The imaginary wall between the stage and the audience.
Star Wars Help Desk That Death Star didn't just run itself, ya know!
The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Easy writing makes hard reading.
Ernest Hemingway
A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to think.
Henry David Thoreau
Every paragraph should be so clear and unambiguous, that the dullest fellow in the world may not be able to mistake it, nor obliged to read it twice in order to understand it.
Lord Chesterfield
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Rules may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties.
The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it.
Next to the crime of writing contrary to what a man thinks is that of writing without thinking.
Samuel Johnson
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Lawrence Clark Powell
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.
Aldous Huxley
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
Geoffrey Cottrell
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
He who writes for fools finds an enormous audience.
The business of the novelist is not to chronicle great events but to make small ones interesting.
Schopenhauer
Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.
Joubert
Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it. Then you do it for a few friends. Finally you do it for money.
Molière
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
Don Marquis
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.
H. L. Mencken
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative." - Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951
The present is the time that is perceived directly, not as a recollection (the past) or a speculation (the future).
“What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.” — Alfred North Whitehead
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.-Albert Einstein
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.- Douglas Adams
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. -- Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose. -- Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)
We express faith in all kinds of situations every single day. We believe we’ll get to work safely, or we’d never get in the car. We believe our love will last a lifetime, or we’d never get married. We believe our favorite chair will support our weight, or we’d never sit down. – Charles Stanley
Apraxia is the loss or impairment of the ability to execute complex coordinated movements. Inability to carryout purposeful movements in the absence of paralysis or paresis.
As meat is to the body, such is reading to the soul. To be at leisure without books is another Hell, & to be buried alive.
Robert Burton
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Bagehot
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.
Lichtenberg
A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain
It takes the publishing industry so long to produce books it's no wonder so many are posthumous.
Teressa Skelton
They who are to be judges must also be performers.
Aristotle
There be some men are born only to suck out the poison of books.
Ben Jonson
Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.
Sir Francis Bacon
A true critic hath one quality in common with a harlot, never to change his title or his nature.
Jonathan Swift
The world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.
Henry Fielding
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices one so.
Sydney Smith
As soon
Seek roses in December--ice in June;
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;
Believe a woman or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that's false, before
You trust in critics.
Lord Byron
Critics! Appalled I ventured on the name.
Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame.
Robert Burns
For critics I care the five hundred thousandth part of the tythe of a half-farthing.
Charles Lamb
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert
The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
Mark Twain
Nature fits all her children with something to do.
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.
James Russell Lowell
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to fine them.
Richard Le Gallienne
A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
George Bernard Shaw
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books involves constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.
George Orwell
One battle doesn't make a campaign, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
Ernest Hemingway
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck
"Eventually, everything connects."—Charles Eames
Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, savor you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it will not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky, and want, more than all the world, your return.- Mary Jean Irion
Dwight Eisenhower noted, "Plans aren't important. Planning is."
It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?- Henry David Thoreau
Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.- John Wooden
When you have a number of disagreeable duties to perform always do the most disagreeable first.- Josiah Quincy
I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by four o'clock.- Henny Youngman
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.- Will Rogers
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