Quotes by Writers - Page 169

Pippa's laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. 'Ha! Why do girls think being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful just creates problems. It's a misery. I wish I were someone else.
Libba Bray
If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.
Daniel C. Dennett
Never judge a work of art by its defects
Washington Allston
Reminds us that greatness lies even in the smallest of moments, in the humblest of hearts, and we shall, each of us, be called to greatness. Whether we shall rise to meet it or let it slip away is the challenge put before us all.
Libba Bray
The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame
Charles Caleb Colton
If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.", 25 February 2010]
Hilary Mantel
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan W. Watts
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Online review sites are the slushpiles of feedback.
S. Kelley Harrell
I’m 100% certain of the quality of story I’m writing until I finish the outline and actually begin to write. At this point, I’m 100% certain the story sucks and I will never show it to another living soul. Until I type “THE END.” At this point, I’m 50% certain it sucks, 50% certain it’s brilliant, and 100% certain if I don’t show it to someone I will spontaneously combust.
Renee Miller
If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
I cry often. I cry and cleanse my face with my tears and swim to the center of it all. A center that I have written about a thousand times, forever etched into the porcelain.
A.P. Sweet
Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.
Jacques Vaché
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
Georges Bataille
No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.
Hilaire Belloc
W jakimś sensie takie osoby jak ona, te, które władają piórem, bywają niebezpieczne. Narzuca się od razu podejrzenie fałszu - że taka osoba nie jest sobą, tylko okiem, które bezustannie patrzy, a to, co widzi, zamienia w zdania; w ten sposób okrawa rzeczywistość ze wszystkiego, co w niej najważniejsze, z niewyrażalności.
Olga Tokarczuk
Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.
M. John Harrison
Turning a manuscript into a book is easy getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.
A.P. Fuchs
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
H.G.Wells
Good writing is always new.
A.S. Byatt
While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
Samuel Johnson
I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
H.P. Lovecraft
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.
Dejan Stojanovic
To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
Dejan Stojanovic
If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Less is more.
William Zinsser
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
Charles Caleb Colton
Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'You enjoy this duty?'He nodded.I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.
Roger Zelazny
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère,” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a cardindex? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? or spend my evenings looking for “copy” in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions — as non-committally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. “My young friend,” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice.
Aldous Huxley
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
José Saramago
I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.
Voltaire
murder your darlings
Arthur Quiller-Couch
J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]
George Sand
Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
Joseph Campbell
Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours there is no life without them.
Herman Wouk
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
M.F.K. Fisher
Any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.
Heywood Broun
Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.
Banana Yoshimoto
History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...
A.S. Byatt
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
The StadiumHave you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators.At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.
Eduardo Galeano
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
H.P. Lovecraft
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...
Aldous Huxley
I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.
Felisberto Hernández
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."[From the preface.]
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Fernando Pessoa
...it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.
Mark Dintenfass
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Alberto Manguel
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
Hilaire Belloc
I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art.
Dylan Thomas