Writing Quotes - Page 102

Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

Jennifer Weiner

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

Don Roff

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud.

Louis Sachar

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

Joseph Campbell

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

Stephen King

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'", March 25, 2007.)

David Halberstam

Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning?" "The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right now he's in the residence eating Cheerios and enjoying Regis and Kathie Lee. Should I get him for you?" "Sarcasm's a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age, Mrs. Landingham." "What age would that be, Toby?""Late twenties?" "Atta boy.

Aaron Sorkin

She doesn't quite chop his head off.She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.

Frank Miller

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

Annie Dillard

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

Patti Smith

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

Elvis Costello

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Ernest Hemingway

Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

Patrick Rothfuss

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

Herman Melville

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Octavia E. Butler

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Vladimir Nabokov

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Isadora Duncan

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

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 don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Pearl S. Buck

DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.

Frank Miller

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

George Orwell

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Dorothy Parker

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

Warren Ellis

Buku yang kau tulis adalah semacam jejak yang terus menyala di dunia, dan bisa menjadi cahaya akhiratmu.

Helvy Tiana Rosa

The thing I write will be the thing I write.

Steve Shilstone

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Virginia Woolf

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar.

Henry Miller

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Paul Auster

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Gustave Flaubert

take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning

Charles Bukowski

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.

Alice Hoffman

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

Jonathan Franzen

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Truman Capote

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing.

Robin McKinley

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland

It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.

Philip Pullman

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

George Orwell

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

Jacques Derrida

I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.

Rob Thurman

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

Charles Bukowski

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Vladimir Nabokov

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Ray Bradbury

CALVIN:Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.

Bill Watterson

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

Theodore Dreiser

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Jennifer Weiner

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

Toni Morrison

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Alice Munro

Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn't even know it.

Krista Ritchie

You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing...

Josip Novakovich

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

Alan Dean Foster

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

Paulo Coelho

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

Orson Scott Card

Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again!

Dee Marie

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Ernest Hemingway

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

William Goldman

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Gilles Deleuze

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Writing Quotes - Page 102

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