Phyllis A. Whitney Quotes

One of the wonderful things about being ALIVE is that it's never too late.

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning.

There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.

Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.

A map is not a journey.

Reading has always been a major part of my life. It has broadened my world and taken me to places I would otherwise have never seen. Now that I am a hundred years old (this September) it still takes me to the outside world I can no longer visit.

But emotion cannot be buried by words, though it can be aroused by them.

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.

Short of throwing away all television sets, I really don't know what we can do about writing.

I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.

It's hard to come up with a 'quote' about myself. Perhaps I could say that most of my writing has been concerned with understanding between people. Whether of different races, or religions, or even in the same family I tried in my books... to deal with the subject of understanding the other fellow.