Monday, June 25, 2012

Quotes From Famous Writers


Here's some more great quotes from great writers. Enjoy!

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
- Stephen King

Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn’t mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage; it means strong, simple, natural sentences.
- Laurence D’Orsay

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
- J. P. Donleavy

Rereading reveals rubbish and redundancy.
- Duane Alan Hahn

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
- Ray Bradbury

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Thomas Mann

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
- Stephen Covey

Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.
- Pete Murphy

If you're a singer you lose your voice.  A baseball player loses his arm.  A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
- Mickey Spillane

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
- Sylvia Plath

If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!
- Fred East

8 comments:

S.A. Larsenッ said...

These are really good. Love your choices, especially Stephen King and Ray Bradbury.

Mirka Breen said...

"Talent is cheaper than table salt"?
With all due respect to Mr. King and his point about hard work, this analogy lost me there.
I always enjoy quotations and, obviously, arguing with them… :)

Kelly Hashway said...

"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."--Isn't that the truth?

Unknown said...

Thanks, Tabitha. I always enjoy your lists. :)

Unknown said...

Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.
- Pete Murphy

I know it's painful and tedious, but I really like the results.

Unknown said...

I dunno. I think it's easy to talk about hard work being the key if you have oodles of talent like King. I know lots of hard-working un-pubbed writers, but none with King's awesome storyteller's voice.
I loved the quote by Pete Murphy! So true.

~ Laura from YALItChat
http://lexacain.blogspot.com/

Tabitha said...

Thank you, Deirdra! I will be sure to stop by your blog and collect my award. :)

J.R. Williams said...

I am loving these quotes. Thanks!