Story Writing Quotes (page 13)
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
Cheryl Strayed
I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
Isak Dinesen
When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.
Madeleine L'Engle
I responded (and with rather touching wholeheartedness) to the sweep of Tolkien's imagination-to the ambition of his story-but I wanted to write my own kind of story, and had I started then, I would have written his... Thanks to Mr. Tolkien, the twentieth century had all the elves and wizards it needed.
Stephen King
Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.
Ray Bradbury
I Need a Good Book I need a good story. I need a good book. The kind that explodes. Off the shelf. I need some good writing, Alive and exciting, To contemplate all by myself. I need a good novel, I need a good read. I probably need. Two or three. I need a good tale. Of love and betrayal. Or perhaps an adventure at sea. I need a good saga. I need a good yarn. A momentous and mightily. Or slight one. But with thousands and thousands. And thousands of books, I need someone to tell me. The right...
John Lithgow
Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.
Charles de Lint
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?
Connie Willis