No-Kill Finance

Writers truly are some of the most influential and smart people on our planet. They can come up with such unique stories and just use the language in such a way that it can make everything they write sound beautiful and intriguing.

If you are on the lookout for inspiration from some fellow great writers or you would simply like to sit back and read some interesting quotes from your favorite writers, here are some to satisfy your needs.

1. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way” – Ernest Hemingway

2. “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.” –Somerset Maugham

3. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” – Madeleine L’Engle

4. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

5. “Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” – William Faulkner

6. “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka

7. “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” – Annie Proulx

8. “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

9. “Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.” – Stephen King

10. “We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.” – John Updike

11. “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.” – Ray Bradbury

12. “People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.” – Harlan Ellison

13. “A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time–proof that humans can work magic.” – Carl Sagan

14. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” – Gustave Flaubert

15. “You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.” Marie de Nervaud

Quotes can make you fall in love with writing even more

No matter how you see it, quotes from famous writers simply show their love and devotion to their job. These people can truly inspire any new and more experienced writers with their words and offer plenty of good advice for everyone who needs it.

You need to keep in mind that you are not the only one thinking of ways to “write my paper easier”. Writing is no easy task and it can take a lot of work until you become great at it. The famous quotes though are here to offer you company on this awesome journey.

This week I received some bittersweet news:  the settlement on my recently-passed grandfather’s house came through, and I’ll be receiving a portion of it to help me pay for a test review class I’m taking next month.

My grandfather, as I’ve mentioned before, was a huge influence on me where thrift and responsibility are concerned.  It was largely in his memory that I became determined to change my outlook on financial matters; he was always trying to instill in me a respect for the value and importance of money, and even tried to convince me from an early age (too early to sink in?) that his seemingly boring “hobby” of stock trading was an excellent source of entertainment.  (While I don’t necessarily agree with that last part, I appreciate his effort.)  Even in passing, he has made me understand the value of knowing that your family will be provided for after you’re gone.

So, I say the news is bittersweet for the obvious reason that he’s no longer with us.  (He, an atheist, would probably gruffly disagree with anyone’s notion that “He’ll always be with me,” and I, also an atheist, would happily nod along.)  But really, I’ve been dealing with the pain of missing him for over a year now, and news of this check coming my way doesn’t make that loss any more or less poignant than it’s ever been.  What’s been made fresh in my mind is something I’d sort of let go of:  this money is coming from the sale of my grandparents’ house, which has been perhaps my single favorite place to spend time in my entire life…so much so that I strongly considered trying to arrange a deal with my parents to keep the house in the family rather than selling it, so I could buy it when I got my finances in order.

That (being an unrealistic goal for someone in my financial position) obviously didn’t happen.  And now, not only will I never again sit in that family room on that worn recliner:  I won’t even have any reason to go back to the city of Olympia, and will therefore potentially never even see the exterior of the house again.  Instead, I get to bulk up my emergency fund and take an LSAT class…I couldn’t think of a less sentimental way to commemorate all of the time I’ve enjoyed there.

The house, it should be noted, was hideous.  The flooring and wallpaper in the kitchen looked like the worst of each to come out of the early ’70s.  The counters were a shade of yellow that could best be compared to the bilious vomit that I sometimes see coming out of ailing cats at work.  The living room, poorly lit and oddly set eight inches below the rest of the house, shook (literally, the whole room shook) if you jumped on or ran across the floor.  The shag carpet in the bathroom, while wonderful on bare feet, was perhaps a bit too plush for a room so closely associated with shameful body functions (i.e. wear your socks if you have a graphic imagination).

But I wanted it, shag carpet and all.  Or, at least, I didn’t want it to go to someone who didn’t appreciate it:  someone who didn’t spend Christmases in that unsturdy living room; someone who didn’t sit by that fireplace during an ice storm; someone whose earliest memories aren’t of sleeping between his grandparents as a kid in the master bedroom.  That family room is the last place I saw my grandmother before she died.  The driveway is the last place I saw my grandfather.  It’s weird to think I’ll never go back there.

I told my mom I was going to imagine that my share of the house represented the corner of the family room with the fireplace.  When we were kids, we used to write letters to Santa on Christmas Eve, and I would always want to put mine in the fire because I felt like that would get the message to him more quickly.  Even after I stopped believing in Santa, I kept wanting to do this each time we were at my grandparents’ for Christmas, because I liked the idea of the contents of paper being sent into the air, drifting around through the evergreen trees that surrounded the house.

Atheist or no, maybe the reason I’ll miss the fireplace so much in particular is because I like the idea of sending up proof that, whether he was around to see it or not, I’ve finally heeded some of what my grandfather tried to teach me.  Maybe he always knew I would, and I just needed to prove it to myself.