Lucy Maud Montgomery Writing Quotations

Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

Make them do as you want them to," she said. "I can’t," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)

You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.

When I read that the flash came, and I took a sheet of paper. . .and I wrote on it: I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.

The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.

never write a line you'd be ashamed to read at your own funeral.

You'll never write anything that really satisfies you though it may satisfy other people.

one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.