“Do it for joy and you can do it forever.”
— Stephen King
“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
“Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
“Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.”
“There's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.”
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
“Above all else, be consistent.”
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. ”
“You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.”
“Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair.”
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
“Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
“The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.”
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
“When the time is gone, you can never get it back.”
“The most important things are the hardest to say.”
“Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”
“Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”
“When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”
“If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?”
“Be true, be brave, stand All the rest is darkness.”
“When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’”
“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.”
“It’s a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”
“Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.”
“I’m most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.”
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
“You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
“Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.”
“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
“Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.”
“JK Rowling created seven Horcruxes. She put a part of her soul in every book and now her books will live forever.”
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.”
“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
“A change is as good as a rest.”
“The monster nevers dies.”
“Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.”
“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
“The scholar’s greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.”
“Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.”
“Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.”
“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
“Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.”
“The turtle couldn’t help us.”
“When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.”
“I write to find out what I think.”
“Only God gets things right the first time.”
“A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable.”
“I work until beer o’clock.”
“Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It’s better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.”
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
“Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”
“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”
“A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.”
“A short story is like a kiss in the dark.”
“Madness is a kind of mental suicide.”
“Long days and pleasant nights.”
“It’s a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.”
“I think that we’re all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better after all.”
“Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
“Talent is never static. It’s always growing or dying.”
“The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.”
“I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It’s you I’m not entirely sure of.”
“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”
“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”
“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.”
“The thought process can never be complete without articulation.”
“If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.”
“I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.”
“In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”
“As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?”
“You should never trust a person who prays in public.”
“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead.”
“The past is obdurate.”
“A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
“You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.”
“There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.”
“Time and tide wait for no man.”
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