Writers Nightmare Quotes & Sayings

I'm told the effect is cumulative
it will continue to worsen." Though outwardly calm as he explained this, his face had paled even more. "But if you tell me about the Valkyrie's weaknesses, I'll administer the antidote."
"Weaknesses? So many. Foremost, we're ... ticklish. — Kresley Cole

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk ... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could've been captured in words. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule. — Frederick William Robertson

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence. — Flannery O'Connor

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. — Steven Pinker

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Be a truth seeker. Go after it with all your might. Let it seep deep into the marrow of your soul. For it will be the only thing to save you in the end. No savior, no religion, no teacher, no guru can do that. You must do it. It is a lifelong pursuit while on this earth. — Dara Reidyr

Desperate pieces of string that hold us up but at the same time keep us from being anything other than what we have always been. — Mary E. Pearson

Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness. — Mary Gaitskill

I liked the books I read that said things like 'I shan't'. I would try to find a way to say in my life, to reply, 'I shan't do that, mother.' That was so far away from my barrio world. — Sandra Cisneros

Both fear and love might cause obedience, but only love causes joy. — Jefferson Bethke

Genuine scientific progress is a slow climb, which requires a stable society to support thinkers and theorists over many generations. — Peter F. Hamilton

In this job, there are some simple pleasures that really help you cope. One is books, I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else. — George W. Bush

The biggest battles in human history can only ever be seen through the eyes of the bloke on the front line, and that's by definition a very focused view and one that will vary from individual to individual. — Karen Traviss

I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error. — James A. Garfield

Bette Davis had very strong opinions and was not afraid to express them. She wasn't afraid of anything that I ever saw. And she was so funny. She's just funny and she was laughing all the time. — Gena Rowlands

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications. — B.W. Powe