Interesting quotes

[NaughteeDragon]

This year I got the company to buy me “The Writer’s Year” day-by-day calendar. I like this quote from yesterday.

"The writer's secret is not inspiration-for it is never clear where it comes from-it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying-to dig a well with a needle — seems to me to have been said with writers in mind." -Orhan Pamuk

I’m tagging @Fatdog25 because he’s recently returned to some stories that have been sitting in his WIP pile. I can’t wait for other people to see them.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I've posted this before, but Murakami on being a novelist:

Right now I'm aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that's all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed - and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Beware the Dog if you value your lawn.

 

[SmilingLez]

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money." - Virginia Woolf

 

[BeechLeaf]

Reading your story after it is published always gives you a fresh light on it, even if it's textually identical to what you submitted. When Jane Austen read the published Pride and Prejudice, she noted:

There are a few typical errors; and a "said he," or a "said she," would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but "I do not write for such dull elves" as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

"The more you reason the less you create." - Raymond Chandler

Put that on my wall.

 

[caleb35]

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

• Cyril Connolly, The New Statesman (February 25, 1933).

 

[Comshaw]

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
Mark Twain





Comshaw

 

[TarnishedPenny]

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Dr Samuel Johnson, as quoted in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. LL.D.