Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 3

We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.

Annie Dillard

Your dreams don’t stop being dreams because of circumstances.

Jason E. Hodges

What's my favorite part that I've written? That’s like asking me to choose which of my kids is least ugly!

Matthew Catania

There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart.

Jason E. Hodges

To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.

Chris Campanioni

A poet’s words are like mortar to the bricks of society.

Jason E. Hodges

As a writer, you can’t get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn’t want to know.

Billy Marshall-Stoneking

A Writer Must Have Text Appeal

Khaled Talib

Destroying the planet is like stepping from a moving train and thinking it will all work out.

Jason E. Hodges

I don’t put that pressure on myself (to write every day), but I do tend to write every day. It’s not pressure—it’s pressure release.

Roxane Gay

Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

James Baldwin

There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.

Fennel Hudson

I don’t think there’s a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And that’s what the best writing does, that’s what art does. It looks a reader in the eye, and it proceeds honestly with that reader, and nakedly. There is a compact there, a bond, a relationship, a union, a symbiosis . . . It’s not about you. Whether you’re a genius or an idiot savant. It’s about the work. The work is more important than you. So it’s not about back-claps and plaudits and “isn’t that author smart.” It’s about, “this book really connected with me. And even though you, my friend, are very different from me, I’m lending it to you, because I think it will connect with you as well.” Community. Across the eras. Between people who have never met, who will never meet, who are nonetheless bound in something together, in different ways.

Colin Fleming

Art uses truth and beauty—both of which can be quite ugly, even as that ugliness is transcended—to foster change, growth, love, perception, friendship. Something that doesn’t do that can be great. But I wouldn’t call it art […]

Colin Fleming

Writing is hard…It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it’s no longer a hobby, it’s no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

Karina Halle

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

Mary Lawrence

A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

Kilroy J. Oldster

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

Stephen King

A voice is a product of the writer’s own Pandora Box of insight, insecurities, bravado, modesty, humility, affection, understanding, and confidence. In short, a voice reflects the writers’ sangfroid. The tenor of the writer’s voice also reflects their insecurities, self-doubt, egotism, testiness, and the ability to identify with their mental and physical infirmities. The inflection that distinguishes a writer’s pitch from other wordsmiths’ tone reflects their collective lifetime of mundane, tranquil, disturbing, and passionate experiences.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I write to remind me of the experiences, fictional or non-fictional, that flows a bit of selfless truths. For the me in the ‘I’, or the me through your eyeballs, it is a serum to separate the lumpiness in my heart.

James Emlund

I have come to learn, that when people of money and power organize to set upon to break a person they seek to silence, and the person seems but a shadow of what they were, under the endless barrage, in the end when laid to rest, the dignity, compassion and presence of the person somehow endures, and their words awaken to speak clearer than before.As if torches ignite, when their flame is gone,and the light of their truth,Is brilliantly lit and once more born.

Tom Althouse

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

Nora Ephron

Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It’s amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.

Pierce Brown

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

Gina McKnight

Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.

E. L. Tenenbaum

I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

A good story is one liked. A great story is one that challenges thought, defiant and gets mouths talking.

Veronica Purcell

As a writer, you don't just write for the ears, you also write for the eyes.

Steven Chopade

Writers are explorers who find new worlds and use words to bring them to our reality.

D. Anne Paris

This is a forum for readers. Authors walk these halls at their own risk. I’ve been to the Coliseum in Rome. GR is just that. Books are gladiators. Readers are ravenous citizens awaiting their next bite of entertainment, all Caesars with thumbs readied for judgement. Even champions fall prey to sword now and then. And you know what they say about the pen and the sword…the analogy is a bit muddled, but it’s in there somewhere.

Willow Madison

The most we can hope for when we write anything is dazzling imperfection. The least we can hope for is accolades from one or two people who don't know us. Spending all afternoon on "the right word" is probably foolish (though I've done it many times), but then again, it may not be. There may be people out there who'll read that nearly-perfect sentence (or paragraph), with its "right word," and they'll nod and smile and say to themselves, "Hey, that's not too bad.

T.M. Wright

Rejection is no badge of honour.

Johnny Rich

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.

Paul Auster

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents’ house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer.

Sahara Sanders

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

Charles Bukowski

Write only if you wish to read it again and again...

Ramana Pemmaraju

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

Richard Wright

A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.

Richard Wright

Why do I do it to myself? Why don't I get an ordinary job?

Philip Tucker

The closest to my heart is not just one book - it’s the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, “Gods’ Food,” is already available in English.

Sahara Sanders

Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life.

Sahara Sanders

The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.

Sahara Sanders

Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.

Terry McDonell

Having authored numerous and pretty versatile write-ups, I can’t say that anything other than my soul, heart and life experience can be called a prominent part of every book I ever wrote

Sahara Sanders

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

Flannery O'Connor

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

Flannery O'Connor

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

Paul Haggis

It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.

Flannery O'Connor

For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.

Flannery O'Connor

A good writer should be able to communicate to the reader, 'I know your life. I know what you have truly experienced. It’s not right or wrong. It’s survival. It’s making mistakes, and trying to redeem yourself. It’s imperfections, and trying to make yourself better. It’s outrages, and crimes, and insults, which often are not righted, which you have to fix yourself, in your own mind, in your own heart, so that you are not poisoned'.

Sergio Troncoso

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.

Graham Greene

Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.

W Somerset Maugham

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Cyril Connolly

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

Julia Cameron

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

John Banville

Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.

Garrett Dennert

Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...

Belle Whittington

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.

Graham Greene

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Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 3

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