Better late than never?

Last week was my week to blog, and I wrote it on my calendar, then didn't look at it again until yesterday.

I love quotes, so I am going to list some good quotes about writing here, to inspire and maybe amuse you. They were culled from all over the internet, so the attribution given is the attribution that the website gave them.

• There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. --Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

• Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947

• There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together. --Josh Billings

• Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! --Edna Ferber

• The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. -- John Steinbeck

• Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it... -- Michael Crichton
  

• I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters. --James A. Michener

• Unless a writer lives with a periodic delusion of his greatness, he will not continue writing. He must believe, against all reason and evidence, that the public will experience a catastrophic loss if he does not complete his novel. The public is just clamoring to give him his fame. --From the book, "Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction" by Leonard Bishop
  

• Writers have to simultaneously believe the following two things:

1. The story I am now working on is the greatest work of genius ever written in English.
2. The story I am now working on is worthless drivel.
. . . . Of course, believing two contradictory facts at the same time is sometimes referred to as madness---but that, too, can be an asset to a writer.
- Orson Scott Card

• The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. ~Mark Twain

• Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

What's Literary Fiction?

This is for Julia, who asked about it at Harry Haines' reading. I am on the Writer's Digest mailing list, and one of their bloggers linked to it. Wonderful timing!

Defining Artless Fiction: 24 Basic Differences Between Literary & Mainstream/Genre Writing
By Janet Paszkowski