Nonwriters Quotes & Sayings

Ha! Don't you know that writers are control freaks? We make our characters dance to our own weird tunes. That's half the fun."

She angled his head ever so slowly to the right. "What's the other half?" Just as the position became uncomfortable, she reversed the motion.

"Rewriting," he said. "You know how you think of a brilliant response to an insult six hours later when it's utterly useless? A writer has a time machine. I can go back to the moment the insult was hurled and parry it with my slow but rapier-sharp wit."

"Relax. I've got you," she said, rotating his head gently to the right. "I guess us nonwriters think you just sit down at your computer and the book comes out the way we read it."

"We foster that myth. It makes us seem more like creative geniuses and less like mere craftsmen. — Nancy Herkness

When sisters sit together, they're always praising their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they're selling their sisters to others. — Anonymous

But fiction is not, as many nonwriters seem to think, a random grab bag of made-up whimsies, as undisciplined and unreasoned as a dream. Nor is it simply reporting with the names changed. It is an amalgam of experience, education, reading, insight, analysis, conversations, observation, and conscious research. — Helen Benedict

You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross. — Jacqueline Woodson

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the sophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how 'pure' their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. — Robert A. Heinlein

I think sometimes in life we rush and only later look back and say, 'Wow, that was something pretty cool that I did,' and we realize we should have been more aware while it was happening. — Holly Holm

Only Experience Teaches You: You can't learn skiing by watching videos. They might help but you still need to find a place with snow, put your skis on, and thrust yourself down the mountain. — Barry Moltz

Love and truth are intimately connected. You cannot have pure love without pure truth and you cannot have pure truth without pure love. — Molly Friedenfeld

In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity. — Edwin Percy Whipple

I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything's black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world's vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home. — Tana French