Courses Quote by Amy Hempel

If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.

— Peter Orner

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating…

— Joyce Carol Oates

If the book is finished—published and on the shelf—I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they…

— Antonya Nelson

For us, there's an inherent process when you're ending something to be thinking about the beginning, as writers.

— Damon Lindelof

After you finish a book, the story still goes on in your mind. You can never change the beginning. But you can always change…

— Sarah Addison Allen

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

— Joyce Carol Oates

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always…

— Lauren Oliver

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it…

— Heidi Julavits

“You are a writer—you write one chapter and go on to the next and the next and so forth. You manage the story, you…

— Patrick Timm

I never know what I'm going to write next. If I'm still writing the book but I'm very near the end, and I begin…

— Elmore Leonard

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her…

— Annie Proulx

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

— Stephen King