Quotes by American Authors - Page 15

Where there is poverty, there will be destruction and exploitation by the corporations and governments benefitting from destroying our rainforests and trafficking wildlife.
Eileen Anglin
We felt as though we had a responsibility to do something about it. So, we did.
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez
To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.
Deborah B. Gould
[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even if he feels aggrieved, he has to judge his words by their usefulness, not by his desire to vent. This isn't about him.
Paul Krugman
What lies between where you are and where you want to be sometimes requires traveling through the Twilight Zone.
Shannon L. Alder
Every day I get better at knowing that it is not a choice to be an activist; rather, it is the only way to hold on to the better parts of my human self. It is the only way I can live and laugh without guilt.
Staceyann Chin
I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words each hour, each day, everyday, until the words become as much a habit as my breathing, and the action which follows becomes as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I can condition my mind to perform every action necessary for my success. I will act now. I will repeat these words again and again and again. I will walk where failures fear to walk. I will work when failures seek rest. I will act now for now is all I have. Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day when the failure will succeed. I am not a failure. I will act now. Success will not wait. If I delay, success will become wed to another and lost to me forever. This is the time. This is the place. I am the person.
Og Mandino
I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
Malcolm X
I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
Malcolm X
Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes." ~ ' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes." -
Clare Boothe Luce
We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
M.T Anderson
It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Samuel Adams
Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!
Gerard Way
We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
Malcolm X
If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.
Albert Einstein
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,Nothing is going to get better. It's not.
Dr. Seuss
Hope is the one positive force to help us persevere during our darkest storms. Jesus gives us hope when He walks beside us through the fiery furnace and helps us rise above adversity.
Dana Arcuri
If you can’t forgive and move on, then your feelings will grow and fester and they will eat you alive.
T.M. Gaouette
Jesus is the light of the world. His light shines through all darkness. His love heals all hatred. His grace and mercy forgives all sins. The anointing of his blood heals the sick and the lame. His guarding angels will forever protect you and his word will forever guide you.
Colishia S. Benjamin
sing so loud that the musicdrowns out the sounds ofthe naysayers.one day they’ll be singingyour song.
JaTawny Muckelvene Chatmon
Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.
Harold Frederic
If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.
Pearl S. Buck
Find the problem, find the story.
John Brown
If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie
Carl Henegan
Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
Ray Bradbury
Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read.But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you’ve become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.
Chila Woychik
Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.
Peter Tieryas
Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.
Alden Bell
What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.
Miyoko Hikiji
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
Sol Stein
What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.
Stephen King
Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?
Julia Cameron
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?...Simplify, simplify.
William Zinsser
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
Zan Marie Steadham
An idea for a story can be anything. The sky is not the limit, the limit is beyond it.
Chrys Fey
T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
Mark Twain
T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
Mark Twain
She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.
John Irving
Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t want to begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.
William Goldman
...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
Lisa Cron
The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself.
Tim O'Brien
The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!
John Gaver
Any thing is interesting if you can communicate it. There are no unimportant subjects for the enlivened mind.
Kris Saknussemm
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.
Christopher Morley
No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not saying a character hasn’t somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her.
Darynda Jones
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
William Zinsser
Verbose is not a synonym for literary.
Constance Hale
Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can’t walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It’s what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOKTranslation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day.
Darynda Jones
In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a case. But who would accept such a definition? Writing is the production of meaning. Writing is thinking.
George Hillocks Jr.
The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .
Wallace Stegner
Voice is really about letting your characters loose.
C.S. Lakin
There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.
Noah Lukeman
For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.
Brett Armstrong
Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.
Colson Whitehead
the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Stanley Fish
The invisibility factor of women in this industry is not unlike the invisibility of girl geeks. We know we exist, but everyone else seems to think we’re an enigma every time they get the notion to write about us and what we apparently want. What we want isn’t any different than what anyone wants. Good stories. With characters we can relate to or identify with or that are interesting to read about. And we’d like to feel welcome, not the perpetual other. We don’t want to feel excluded or like props in every narrative. We don’t want or need every story to be about a girl character. But we’d like them to be treated with the same care and attention male characters are. And it is possible, even in male dominated narratives.
Mariah Huehner
Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk.
Stanley Fish
Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar.
Dan Alatorre