Craft Quotes - Page 2

Ladies and gentleman," he said over the speakers, "welcome aboard this recently liberated Gulfstream V. If I could have your attention for just a few moments, I'd like to go over the safety features of this aircraft. It has an engine, to make us go, and wings, to keep us in the air. There are seatbelts, which won't do you an awful lot of good if we fly into the side of a mountain.

Derek Landy

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we

Ken Kesey

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

James Robertson

Ken Kesey

It's as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.

Elinor Fuchs

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

Charles Baxter

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.", Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

John Irving

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.]

William Faulkner

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Sydney Smith

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

Roman Payne

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Katherine Anne Porter

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Madeleine L'Engle

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

James Baldwin

I write to find strength.I write to become the person that hides inside me.I write to light the way through the darkness for others.I write to be seen and heard.I write to be near those I love.I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper. I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear.I write past the embarrassment of exposure.I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal. I write myself out of nightmares.I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings.I write to remember.I write knowing conversations don’t always take place.I write because speaking can’t be reread.I write to sooth a mind that races.I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide.I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long.I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be.I write to provide a legacy.I write to make sense out of senselessness.I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding. I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers.I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time. I write because God loves stories.I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.

Shannon L. Alder

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

George R.R. Martin

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

Lady Gaga

Lineation can make your break your poems.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

A.S. Byatt

The Author To Her BookThou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did'st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad exposed to public view,Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.I cast thee by as one unfit for light,The visage was so irksome in my sight,Yet being mine own, at length affection wouldThy blemishes amend, if so I could.I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,And take thy way where yet thou art not known.If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;And for thy mother, she alas is poor,Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

Anne Bradstreet

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

Kamand Kojouri

Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.

Amit Kalantri

The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

When you are posessed by evil spirits, it is crafty manipulations that you follow; but when you are posessed by the Holy Spirit of God, it is wise discretions you pursue!

Israelmore Ayivor

The world is a busy place filled with many busy businesses, both the Godly and the ungodly. It means before you go on to accept any activity or event that comes into the world, you must weigh its Values, examine the Virtues, listen to Views and then you give your Verdict. Satan is not wise; he is just crafty!

Israelmore Ayivor

Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies...

Emily Dickinson

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

Roman Payne

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

Noël Coward

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

Shannon L. Alder

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

Criss Jami

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Craft Quotes - Page 2

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