Writing Process Quotes - Page 9

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.

Dean Koontz

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

John Geddes

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time.

Joseph Brodsky

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Graham Greene

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

Kilroy J. Oldster

There is nothing more valuable in the writing process than a friend to hold you accountable to your own potential.

J.R. Young

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.

Christy Hall

WARNING: The production of spirit is a very delicate and dangerous procedure. It should be left to the professionals and under absolutely no circumstance be replicated.

S.A. Tawks

We write to embrace the sacred thoughts.

Lailah Gifty Akita

In a suspended psychic state, writers cull words and symbols from the mystical world of memory, imagination, and intuition.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Whenever I feel sad, I just take out my phone and listen to her laughter recorded in my online messenger.

Avijeet Das

Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

Austin Penman

words are a border collie’s worst nightmare.

Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons’ minds.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in.

Anastasia Bolinder

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

Anne Lamott

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

Virginia Woolf

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Zbigniew Herbert

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

William H. Gass

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

Zbigniew Herbert

But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer reflects that through expressing them he has realized his inevitable and well-deserved triumph. The lean years of patient toil when no one paid attention may even begin to seem preferable to the present. The very thing you created in the heat of fierce concentration has destroyed the circumstances that made it possible. The writer is devoured along with his books.

Tim Parks

Whenever I encounter writer’s block, I stop writing … with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It’s easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What’s difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

David Shields

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

Marcus Valerius Martialis

...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...

John Geddes

I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.

L.M. Fields

The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.

Hal Zina Bennett

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut—swallows me up like so many remains—I army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.Such is a writer’s life.

Chila Woychik

Split your skull—a hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument—a scalpel, perhaps—and make a hand-sized slit; it doesn’t matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you’ve just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

Chila Woychik

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

Chila Woychik

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry‘til not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper“Read…

Chila Woychik

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

Chila Woychik

Pencil. Paper. Forget the world.

Shaun Hick

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.

David Mitchell

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

Stephanie Lennox

With poetry and writing, the question isn’t “do you know the right words?”.The real question is, “can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?

Jacob Nordby

If you're not creating, you're disintegrating.

Tawny Lara

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

Shaun Hick

At first the creative mind submits to its entry into the symbolic register and gets itself structured like everyone else. Then he balks at a fateful moment which becomes a turning point in the history of his mental growth. From the entry into the imaginary order where he acknowledges his ego and then to the symbolic order where he recognizes his place in the society and finally in his de-symbolization or a refusal to obey the Law that is the rules of the world of symbols, a creative genius is born.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer.

Rossana Condoleo

There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books....My mind is a body that's a mind.

Sergio Troncoso

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

Charlie Kaufman

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.

Julia Cameron

I write the sacred words from wondering.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself

Dorothy L. Sayers

When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is magic happening on paper

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is self-pleasure

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Writing is all about self-expression, we want to speak up, to get it off our chest. Whether we make an impact or not that is not for us to decide

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If I had time, money and knowledge I could write about everything; but no problem, Google is already doing it

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The power of the writer is to capture the thoughts live and present them as they appeared in his mind

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Self-censorship is more efficient than any police. You write and say not what you really think, but what you believe is acceptable. By that process we lose those revolutionary ideas that could change society for the better

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers

Bangambiki Habyarimana

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Writing Process Quotes - Page 9

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