“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
More from Ray Bradbury on Writing
“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”
“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.”
“It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.”
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
“Create a character with an obsession, then follow.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”