Kate Morgenroth

Favorite Writing Quotes selected by Kate Morgenroth

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." —Thomas Mann

"Fiction is a little like handwriting. It comes out to be you no matter what you do." —John Updike

A bookseller reported to Publishers Weekly a most unusual complaint from a buyer: "A customer returned The Witches by Roald Dahl because it had witches in it."

"In the writing the good things will come." —James Joyce

"My subjective experience [of writing] is that each day is some fresh hell"—Dorothy Parker

"I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint." —James Thurber

"Write your own name a hundred time and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one—tenth of a new novel, and you will be lucky to escape the madhouse.

And yet you haven't experienced the full of it. Your own name can at least be written down mechanically. You need have no ideas. You can work like a sweated laborer doing piece—work in a factory. But the novelist has to write down different names, nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, reeling across the page. They have to make sense." —T.H. White

"I gave up the idea of trying to show how smart I am. Now I want the language to be transparent, for people to totally forget they're even reading a book." — Dark

Paganini's formula for creativity: "Toil—Solitude—Prayer."

Elmore Leonard was once asked how he managed to keep the action in his books moving so quickly. He said, "I leave out the parts that people skip."

"To write is to sit in judgment on oneself." —Henrik Ibsen

Steve Martin on his novel: "I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper."