Sol Stein Quotes

#1. A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets. - Author: Sol Stein

#2. Parents begin by loving their children; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. - Author: Sol Stein

#3. There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. - Author: Sol Stein

#4. Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes. - Author: Sol Stein

#5. Writers of nonfiction have the right - perhaps even the responsibility - to access the wonders of the writer's craft to make their work interesting and enjoyable. - Author: Sol Stein

#6. In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories - Author: Sol Stein

#7. Say it new or say it straight. - Author: Sol Stein

#8. When we get involved with other people, the chances of a clash are present even with people we love because we do not have the same scripts in our heads. - Author: Sol Stein

#9. You can never know enough about your characters. - Author: Sol Stein

#10. Readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience ... is increasingly visual. - Author: Sol Stein

#11. To create tension, dialogue needs to be stretched out. That is, characters should not be immediately responsive. - Author: Sol Stein

#12. A writer who always has his characters "walk" is missing opportunities. - Author: Sol Stein

#13. The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting ... Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur. - Author: Sol Stein

#14. A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue. - Author: Sol Stein

#15. In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is. - Author: Sol Stein

#16. It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing - Author: Sol Stein

#17. Tension produces instantaneous anxiety, and the reader finds it delicious. - Author: Sol Stein

#18. Be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator. - Author: Sol Stein

#19. Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts. - Author: Sol Stein

#20. Today's readers can be roughly divided into two groups, those who accept the fantasy villains of childhood, as in the James Bond stories and Arnold Schwarzenegger films, and those who insist on credibility. - Author: Sol Stein

#21. The expert magician seeks to deceive the mind, rather than the eye. - Author: Sol Stein

#22. The function of suspense is to put the reader in danger of an overfull bladder. - Author: Sol Stein

#23. Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately. - Author: Sol Stein

#24. Arousal is nature's stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen sooner or later, but it must happen. - Author: Sol Stein

#25. Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action. - Author: Sol Stein

#26. Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on. - Author: Sol Stein

#27. The single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author's courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer - Author: Sol Stein

#28. A writer writes what other people only think. - Author: Sol Stein