Writing Life Quotes - Page 8

Last night, I was a mad man searching for a whiff of your fragrance. The stars and the moon even laughed at me.

Indie publishing lets me feed my inner control freak.

Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social?

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

Agatha Christie

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

Rod Serling

I already knew the next story that I was going to rewrite from the beginning. Mine.

Indu Muralidharan

I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.

Anton Chekhov

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

Anne Sexton

Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist’s case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person’s life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The act of writing involves documenting and studiously examining interactions of all aspects of the self, the environment, and culture. Writing is an illustrious act of self-expression. Writing resembles a ‘coming of the age’ story because the ongoing process of defining a person’s personality and character is representative of the synergistic product of the continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world, the constant process of developing psychological, social, cognitive and ethical self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.

Judith Barrington

All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

Carla H. Krueger

Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.

Kilroy J. Oldster

There are authors who write to communicate, there are authors who write to impress themselves.

Mark S. Hertzog

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

Carla H. Krueger

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Annie Cohen-Solal

Be Visionary ...

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".

May Sarton

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

Pat Conroy

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing

Cormac McCarthy

Receiving very little or no feedback from my writing I really don't know if people like it or if they are actually reading any of my work for that matter. Still I will continue to write regardless. I suppose it is similar to people who talk just to hear their own voice. I write simply to see my own thoughts in print.

Andrew James Pritchard

Real-life duties eat valuable writing time.

Rayne Hall

I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.

Laini Taylor

Next to motherhood, I personally believe that being an author is the best job in the world.

Geraldine Solon

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a vortex" as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her "scribbling suit" consisted of a black woollen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally, to ask, with interest, "Does genius burn, Jo?" They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew; and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew; and not until the red bow was seen gayly erect upon the gifted brow, did any one dare address Jo.

Louisa May Alcott

Not everyone gets to do what they love, be good at it, and get paid for it. If you do, you're lucky.

Britt Holewinski

Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The biggest thing for aspiring writers I would say is that writing is hard work. You can’t sustain the fantasy that it should somehow be otherwise for you because you are more special or more committed than other aspiring writers. You aren’t sitting down to be entertained by the gods or to entertain yourself. At times it can be a thrill and it feels more like play, but we are easily deceived by whatever pleasures or rewards writing can offer. Exhilarating work is still work. Is it work, or is it play? And the answer is “yes.” Does it sometimes feel like it comes easily or naturally? Yes. But did it really come easily? No. Writing doesn’t offer the rhythmic endorphin hit you get scrolling down the screen clicking on memes. Are you up for the work it is going to take to become successful as a writer? It is going to be harder than you think. You are submitting to forces and to a process that you can’t fully control. There is maybe a tiny bit more control if you self-publish, and there is no shame in doing that, but even that is going to introduce hard work. Probably harder than you think. If my next novel can’t find a home, I’m not above self-publishing it in some capacity and then moving on to the next project.

Brian K. Friesen

Oh, readers. If only you knew what we've gone through for you.

Harry Olsen

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

Marcus Speh

Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.

Patti Digh

I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about... only out of time to write it in.

Rayne Hall

Sometimes we dream of things that we've always wanted--of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it...and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I have to write...so I do.

Cassandra Giovanni

Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City...

Christy Hall

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

George Orwell

...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.

Rob Bignell

There is always, always, always something to write about.

Rob Bignell

Writing heals my heart like no pill ever could.

Rob Bignell

Every book I've read appears in my writing.

Rob Bignell

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

Peter Straub

As a writer, my mission is to represent the perceptible world in such a way that readers can see the extraordinary that lives all around them. I want to converse on the page. I want to squash the humdrum, the mendacity that arrives due to too many overworked routines and overfed expectations. I want to entertain and awaken. I want to imagine and observe. I want to spin my fiction from an honest, curious place.

Jen Knox

What’s it like being a writer? Mostly it’s like being a child surrounded by adults. My friends have grown-up careers. They balance spreadsheets, analyze data, negotiate deals. They build things, heal patients, teach children. Meanwhile, I’m over here saying “Let’s pretend.

Jennifer Froelich

The moment I realize I just stayed up until five in the morning writing is that moment I know I am meant to be a writer.

Anastasia Bolinder

A writer’s tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection.

Kilroy J. Oldster

A person whom works exclusively for money places a price tag on his or her soul. A person whom labors to attain fame seeks a false form of adulation. The writer ignores the lure of a glamorous life by seeking to penetrate the darkness of their own being and meditate the larger issues that frame existence. A seeker knowingly follows a path that is barren, bleak, desolate, and unproductive in terms of attaining recognition and exulted social and financial status.

Kilroy J. Oldster

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

Chris Everheart

Writing Tip:Don't let the "writing rules" bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story.

Linda Westphal

Everything from the humble woodlouse to specks of dust moving through a ray of sunlight. Each tells a story.

Fennel Hudson

Writing is a blurred mirror. Sometimes we work harder to see how we are reflected, but often we avert our gaze from the shadowy image.

Kristen Twardowski

I'm merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories

Michael Biondi

Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It’s an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.

Jason E. Hodges

Success does not bring happiness. Success brings success.

Joanie Holzer Schirm

All people intuitively seek emotional equanimity, freedom from anxiety, distress, and trepidation that might cause a person to lose symmetrical balance of their mind. Nature intended for human beings to live in an enthusiastic and curious manner, always exploring, striving, and creating.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Our stories are our best gifts--treasure and share them!

Gail Kittleson

The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

Alice Munro

Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.

Kilroy J. Oldster

To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.

Pat Conroy

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Writing Life Quotes - Page 8

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