Gary Gygax Quotes

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Most good media come out of somebody saying, 'This should exist; this is something I want to read.'

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

I always write about what interests me.

My background was producing and writing and performing in television when I started out, and I really missed that, that whole creative process that comes from sort of 'me' storytelling.

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

I've always loved writing. It was always what I wanted to do.

I've always loved to write. I've been writing a lot longer than I've been acting, and I hope to continue to do that and maybe do it a little bit more in terms of, like, writing movies that I could potentially act in.

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.