Cassandra Clare Quotes

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write, and don't try to please readers who like something different.

If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.

Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

I had no ghost writers for the books - I wrote every line myself.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.

I think it is more important to tell a story rather than follow any trend; that is a less bold way to go. If you do that [follow trends] you are just trying to ride on the coat tails of someone else's success.

One pretends to do something, or copy someone or some teacher, until it can be done confidently and easily in what becomes one's own style

When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.

Write what you love and love what you write.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

One thing that I don't ever want to do is write something I don't love.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote "with his blood," and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.

For many years I wanted to be a rock star but of course that didn't work out. I did however write on napkins and pieces of paper sentences and occurrences. I decided maybe I should write a book because I had been writing so much. I'm actually writing a book based on The Room that will hopefully be published soon.