Creative Writing Quotes – Page 53

“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”

Josh Billings

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

Mark Twain

“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”

Ernest Hemingway

“He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays – cynical, but hopeful.”

Dame Rose Macaulay

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?”

Vita Sackville-West

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Sometimes everything has to be enscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.”

“It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.”