A Year in Author Quotes

Clippings from the Newsletter

Subscribers to my monthly newsletter know that I share a quote to close out the month’s updates and shares. Sometimes they correspond to the season or a major holiday. More often they speak to my own headspace and current-to-the-month thoughts on writing craft and process. But they are always bookish and writerly. Here is a look back over the featured quotes from the last twelve months – a year in author quotes, some of my favorite writing-relevant nuggets of wisdom.

A Year in Author Quotes

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

~ William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

“You can find inspiration in everything. If you can’t. then you’re not looking properly.”

~ Paul Smith, Fashion Designer

“My first copies of Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn still have some blue spruce needles scattered in the pages. They smell of Christmas still.”

~ Charlton Heston

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

~ G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

~ Stephen King

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”

~ Joseph Heller

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

~ Mark Twain

“I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.”

~ Don Roff

“Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.”

~ A. A. Milne

“When I graduated from high school I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.”

~ Ray Bradbury

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time–proof that humans can work magic.”

~ Carl Sagan

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

If you enjoyed that lookback at a year of author quotes, you may like one of my more regular, article-style posts, like this one, where I unpack how I set up my Scrivener template for a fresh novel. Or, if you prefer your quote feed set to a slow, savoring trickle, the monthly quote is a newsletter feature that isn’t going away anytime soon.

Until next time, may your coffee be strong, and your reading (and writing!!) yield many pearls of wisdom!