Category: Hooked On Quotes

In The Trenches, Sigh In—Sigh Out

Leave a comment

“Please don’t entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it witout a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flamelike — breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? … Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you’ll wait for ever.” 

― Ngaio Marsh, Death on the Air and Other Stories

Happy, & Now You Know It

Leave a comment

“Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it’s a big deal to bow–or kneel or get knocked down–to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else’s. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.” 

― Patricia Hampl

Does Your Writing Have YOU?

3 Comments

“There’s one thing your writing must have to be any good at all. It must have you. Your soul, your self, your heart, your guts, your voice — you must be on that page. In the end, you can’t make the magic happen for your reader. You can only allow the miracle of ‘being one with’ to take place. So dare to be yourself. Dare to reveal yourself. Be honest, be open, be true…If you are, everything else will fall into place.” 

― Elizabeth Ayres

What Goes In…Is What Comes Out

Leave a comment

“To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children’s classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven’t done for a while….” 

― Lucy Sussex

One Word to Rule Them All

Leave a comment

“If you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as the link. If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear. As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point. So the essential Quest started at once. But I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo did. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there.

— (J.R.R. Tolkien to W.H. Auden, June 7, 1955.)” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

Book Construction

Leave a comment

“For as long as I could remember, I’d been making vague and confident assurances that any day I would finish the thing [my book]. If and when I ever did, they would probably feel an almost physical sense of relief. I was like a massively incompetent handyman who’d been up on their roof now for years, trying to take down a gnarled old lightning-struck tree trunk that had fallen against the house, haunting every gathering, all discussions of family business, any attempt they made to sit down together and plan for the future, with the remote but ceaseless whining of my saw.” 

― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys