Search Quotes

"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."

"The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeedin..."

"I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it."

"That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows."

"To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work."

"I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions."

"Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)"

"Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the..."

"I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. 'I'm thinking of writing it f..."