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Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

Jane Yolen

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Jane Yolen
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: February 11
Editor
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Jane Hyatt Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolen Stemple
Jane H. Yolen Stemple
Writing
Cheapest
Gathered
Free
Part
Ideas
Hard

More quotes by Jane Yolen

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You write to be read. That is the bottom line.
Jane Yolen
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Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.
Jane Yolen
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Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
Jane Yolen
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Aren't hidden doors the most alluring? The old stories point that out surely. Even the greatest heroes and heroines fall under the spell of a locked door.
Jane Yolen
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Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.
Jane Yolen
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What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.
Jane Yolen
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A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?
Jane Yolen
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It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.
Jane Yolen
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Exercise the writing muscle every day.
Jane Yolen
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Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
Jane Yolen
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Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.
Jane Yolen
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I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.
Jane Yolen
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If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
Jane Yolen
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Wood may remain twenty years in the water, but it is still not a fish.
Jane Yolen
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A shadowless man is a monster, a devil, a thing of evil. A man without a shadow is soulless. A shadow without a man is a pitiable shred. Yet together, light and dark, they make a whole.
Jane Yolen
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Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.
Jane Yolen
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Intuition works best when you remember that “tuition” is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.
Jane Yolen
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Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.
Jane Yolen
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Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.
Jane Yolen
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Touch magic. Pass it on.
Jane Yolen