“But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It’s like anything else. It’s a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.”
— Ron White
Tag: books
Like Being Alone
“And I find – I’m 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn’t diminished any. That’s the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.”
— John Irving
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Science of Writing
“Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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One Reason to Write
“As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.”
— Neil Gaiman
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Homework Every Night
“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
— Lawrence Kasdan
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Basic Elements
“We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”
— Stephen King
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Insight into Human Nature
“It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.”
— William Bernbach
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Writer Spies
“The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.”
— Graham Greene
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Punctuation [semi] Outdone
Lynne Truss on punctuation:
“But colons and semicolons — well, they are in a different league, my dear! They give such lift! Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots . . . you stop.
But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes — that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity — well, they are the colons and semicolons.”
Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is an excellent resource for writers of all kinds. You can find it here.
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No Secret to Success
“There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call ‘the breaks.’ In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things – read and write – and wait.”
— Countee Cullen
Editing Addict, LLC 