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Writing Quotes by John Steinbeck
- I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
- Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
- I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story…
- To finish is a sadness to a writer - a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't…
- They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of…
- I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.
- Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite…
- If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have…
- Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined…
- If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to…
- Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
- If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a…
- The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
- Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
- A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
- Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps.…
- In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
- Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.
- Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.
- A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects…
- The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.
- A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never…
- I start out to write five days a week, and then it runs to six days and finally seven. Then, eventually, that wave of weariness…
- I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of…
- The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come…
More Ways to Read Writing Quotes by John Steinbeck
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov