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The Career Indie Author Quote Book is a different kind of quote book for writers, containing more than 2,300 pieces of hand-curated thoughtful advice from authors famous and anonymous, with a little help from fashion designers, sports stars, advertising experts, movie stars, sex symbols, musicians, internet influencers, and Career Indie Author authors Bill and Teresa Peschel.
Drawn from a lifetime of reading, Writers Gone Wild author Bill Peschel collected the best advice on all aspects of the writing life, from Abuse to Young Adult. Many of these quotes were drawn from newspaper and magazine interviews and have never been seen elsewhere. Each quote was checked for accuracy, and sometimes expanded upon for the sake of accuracy.
Where Did All These Quotes Come From?
The Career Indie Author Quote Book bibliography can be found here.
Practical advice
Chuck Palahnuik: “Build your novel with a number of scenes or chapters that can stand alone as short stories. Magazines and websites can excerpt these, and they make a much better advertisement for your book.”
Annie Dillard: “Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.”
Patricia Highsmith: “The greatest service a wife can render her writer husband is not typing his manuscripts for him, but keeping people away from him. Of course, a husband might do the same, if his wife is the writer.”
Neil Gaiman: “Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.”
Reassurances
George Patton: “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.”
John Cleese: “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”
Lemony Snicket: “ I thought these books would be miserable failures.”
Nora Roberts: “I can fix a bad page, but I can’t fix a blank one.”
Humor
Michael O’Donoghue: “My advice to the would-be writer is that he start slowly, writing short undemanding things, things such as telegrams, flipbooks, crank letters, signature scarves, spot quizzes, capsule summaries, fortune cookies and errata.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs: “There is something to be said in extenuation of weather and scenery, which, together with adjectives, do much to lighten the burdens of authors and run up their word count.”
Margo Kaufman: “Truth is funnier than most things you can make up.”
Terry Pratchett: “You have to have tragic relief. If a book is nothing but funny, then it is nothing but funny. There is no contrast and it’s hard to take anything seriously.”
There are also quotes on notable moments in literary history, such as the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Stephen King’s National Book Award, and Lionel Shriver’s attack on political correctness.
The Career Indie Author Quote Book is the perfect deskside companion. It’s brief, breezy, pungent quotes suggests ways to create memorable characters, ignore bad reviews, and battle writer’s block. It’s a shot in the arm against the self-doubt, nervousness, despair, and loneliness that is part of the writing life.