Writing Quotations- instructional quotes "A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious."
Walker Percy "The title to a work of writing is like a house's front porch.... It should invite you to come on in." Angela Giles Klocke "In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm." Fran Lebowitz "Read, read, read. Read everything- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write." William Faulkner "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book." Samuel Johnson
"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
--William Strunk, Jr. "To produce a mighty work, you must choose a mighty theme." Herman Melville "Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader- not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." E.L. Doctorow "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." E.L. Doctorow "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy "A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms." Patricia Lee Gauch "Show don't tell." Henry James "If you tell me, it's an essay. If you show me, it's a story." Barbara Greene
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Anton Chekhov
"A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem like a happy accident." W. Somerset Maugham
"Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded." Sidney Sheldon "Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space." Orson Scott Card
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." Robert Frost
"As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint." Joan Aiken "I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day." Ernest Hemingway
"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way." Richard Harding Davis "So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart. That's the one you have to write." Lurleen McDaniel
"If a book comes from the heart, it will continue to reach other hearts." Thomas Carlyle "A kid is a guy I never wrote down to. He's interested in what I say if I make it interesting." Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) "Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke."
F. Scott Fitzgerald "An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart." Uri Shulevitz "I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read." Gayl Jones "A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories." John Irving "A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then." C.S. Lewis "Most new writers think it's easy to write for children, but it's not. You have to get in a beginning, middle and end, tell a great story, write well, not be condescending--all in a few pages."
Andrea Brown "The best children's book writers are not people who have kids, but people who write from the child within themselves." Andrea Brown "I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures."- Maurice Sendak "I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe." Madeleine L'Engle "Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject. " E. B. White "If you wish to be a writer, write." .Epictetus "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
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