Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing.

The only thing that works with writing is that you care so passionately about it yourself, that you make someone else care passionately about it.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

Write what you want to read. So many people think they need to write a particular kind of book, or imitate a successful style, in order to be published. I've known people who felt they had to model their book on existing blockbusters, or write in a genre that's supposed to be "hot right now" in order to get agents and publishers interested. But if you're writing in a genre you don't like, or modeling yourself on a book you don't respect, it'll show through. You're your first, most important reader, so write the book that reader really wants to read.

...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself

I write with all my heart

Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!

I just loved storytelling. That's what I thought I would end up doing. I thought I would probably go to school and end up writing for a magazine or something.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.

It's just writing about things, feelings, not that we're dark or depressed...just as much as anyone else is.

Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

Generally speaking, an author's style is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

I don't want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

It feels like when I write, it's intuitive. This is true of Frances, and it's true of this [The Funniest Movie Of The Summer].

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.