Rules For Writing Quotes

#1. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]

Helen Dunmore

#2. But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.

Fannie Hurst

#3. Rules for writing the first line? The last line?
First line: Make them want more.
Last line: Make them want the next book.

Darynda Jones

#4. I had an advantage over a lot of people who had gone to school and earned degrees in writing and had learned the rules for writing, so to speak. My style was just to tell a story but to tell it well, and that has worked out for me so far.

Robert Kurson

#5. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

#6. Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

Rhianna Pratchett

#7. For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

Hilary Mantel

#8. The three rules to writing a novel;

1) Write
2) Write more
3) Keep writing

Sci Furz

#9. Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

Robert A. Heinlein

#10. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Virginia Woolf

#11. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

Melinda Rucker Haynes

#12. It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.

Eric Burns

#13. I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

Joni Mitchell

#14. When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

Hilary Mantel

#16. Writing about race and crime was not new territory for me. But it can be treacherous. So here are my rules: No stereotypes. No generalizations. No explanations. No apologies. Just the facts, ma'am.

Colin Flaherty

#17. Neither in writing nor in reading wilt thou be able to lay down rules for others before thou shalt have first learned to obey rules thyself.

Marcus Aurelius

#18. Eschew surplusage.

Mark Twain

#19. There are no rules in writing. If the words work for you, use them.

Claire Contreras

#20. I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.

Raymond Chandler

#21. I like rules. I like definitions, categories, and writing advice of all sorts. When I'm writing fiction, there are often a lot of things for me to try to get right at once, and rules help me to stay organized. But my favorite rule of all is that, ultimately, there are no rules.

Bruce Holland Rogers

#22. There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.

Tarang Sinha

#23. I write movies about mavericks, about people who break rules, and I don't like movies about people who are pulverised for being mavericks.

Quentin Tarantino

#24. The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

H.L. Mencken

#25. We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy, and we should do it today while our economy is in the position of global strength, because if we don't write the rules for trade around the world, guess what: China will.

Barack Obama

#26. There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

Mason Cooley

#27. Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.

Ethel Waters

#28. One of the rules of history is that people do not write about what is too obvious to mention. And so the information, having never been recorded, is now lost for ever.

Michael Bywater

#29. One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

George R R Martin

#30. Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.

Robert Silverberg

#31. For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.

Red Smith

#32. Wherein we discover that many of the "rules" for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.

Natalie Goldberg