Gertrude Stein Quotes

Write in a disciplined manner, but write in a way that is natural to the individual's thought processes.

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.

I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.

I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.

I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

When I write, I'm talking to myself constantly to make sure that it sounds OK; it has kind of a nice rhythm and a nice jump to it.

I used to write fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction and have a clear pattern because I'd need a break from one style when going into the next book.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.