Quotation Saturday

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

~Robert Frost

Know the rules, and the rules will make you free.

~Orson Scott Card

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

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

True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.

~Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.

~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.

~Stephen King

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

~Henry David Thoreau

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

~Rhys Alexander