writing-quotes

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I don't write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

- Winston Churchill

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don't know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

- Carrie Fischer

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I don't write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

- Edgar Allan Poe

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I'd written, I don't want to leave that behind.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

- Carrie Fischer

And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me.

I never sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

- Edgar Allan Poe

I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don't really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I've always had more than one thing going.

A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.

There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.

What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.

- Carrie Fischer

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn't matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

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