Harlan Ellison Quotes

People do write books.

Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism.

When I finish my first draft I usually narrate it to some trusted friends who can give me feedback. All criticism is welcome.

I want to be an author.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

I had always loved to write and my mom was my editor for my school papers.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

I think I learned most from editing, both editing myself and having someone else edit me. It's not always easy to have someone criticize your work, your baby. But if you can swallow your ego, you can really learn from the editing.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I hate to badmouth any book or writer, because I know how it feels to be on the other end of that.

My first love is literature.

One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.

Every inch of my writing career has been influenced by my screenwriting education. I was lucky enough to go to film school at USC, and I got a crash course in how to tell a story efficiently. I learned structure, pace, my style, how to know your audience, and most importantly, how to take criticism and edits properly.

I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.

I have great stories. I am going to write a book.

Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.

Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.