Writing Quotes - Page 11

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flowers that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.

Eduardo Galeano

Make your heroes ambitious, always looking for more success and uniqueness.To write the best story you can, think of making your hero, or heroes, have an ambitious for an unlimited success.-How to write the best story-

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Deal with your readers that theyare smart, and write a language thatsuits their intelligence.- How to write the best story-

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Choose noble goals for your heroes.Make them Sympathize with the poor, collaborates on the good goals, always step forward for the good actions, the first ones to do the right things, care to reserve others rights, and respect the laws, traditions and values.

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the

Will Self

Quinns always come at half price, about half the time, and half-naked, even during the colder half of winter. A Quinn is like a queen, but draggier, and cheaper to buy and use for personal gain, unless you’re suspicious that you’re poor and illiterate like Jarod Kintz, in which case Quinns could be the spirits of your dead relatives, come to haunt you until you gather a massive fortune through selling books on the internet, to send some back in time through a portal you bought from the NSA, so they would have lived better lives without having to move a finger for their fortune. Oh, yah, and since they aren’t - they’re blue, like smurfs, yet they turn purple whenever tickled on the belly, which is something they seem to rather dislike, since they start biting and scratching when it happens, for no good reason, I might add.

Will Advise

A writer's tragedy: to know all the words and nothing else.

Marty Rubin

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.

Felipe Alfau

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

Roberto Bolaño

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

John Dryden

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.

Christian Nestell Bovee

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

Zadie Smith

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick

Harper Lee

Remember, we all make our work available in a commercial transaction, the terms of which we, ourselves, dictate. If we give it away for free, that’s our decision, and there is no refuge in the lame defense, “what do you want for nothing?” The buyer does not waive his right to express his opi

Pete Morin

These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults. Which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings in all kinds, wherewith this ancient sect has honoured the world, shall immediately find, from the whole thread and tenor of them, that the ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers; and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms themselves have made.

Jonathan Swift

If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.

William Cowper

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.

Oliver Markus

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

Truman Capote

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoilism - a kind of pelting of pretentious literature with dung, lest the writers get above themselves; it is to the novelist what the gown of humiliation was to the Roman politician - a salutary ordeal. Less grandly, bad reviews are fun, so long as you are not the author. There is, it must be admitted, a kind of furtive blood sport pleasure in seeing a novelist suffer. You read on. Whereas most of us stop reading at the first use of the word 'splendid' or 'marvellous' in a review.

John Sutherland

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue. Who, other than its creator, is to say what a work of fiction means or is worth? It can take years to write a novel and only a few hours for a critic, or a reviewer rushing for a tight deadline, to trash it.

John Sutherland

Will you read this? I think maybe it sucks. Or maybe it's awesome. It's probably awesome. Tell me it's awesome, okay? Unless it sucks." — Nick

Rainbow Rowell

The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you've written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called "They Walk Alone." "Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if," it seemed to say.

Wolcott Gibbs

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Joyce Carol Oates

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless medio

Anton Chekhov

How did writing come to me? Like bird’s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.

René Char

Writing is 90% struggle. The other 10% is up to you.

Iain Cameron Williams

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

Sara Sheridan

That’s why it’s difficult to write about your own life. Any distortion feels like a betrayal.

Paul Park

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

Octavia E. Butler

Once again discovered: Do what you do because you enjoy. If expect others to give credit or honor your work, you are due for disappointment

Phillip Gary Smith

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

John Cleese

I enjoy writing historical fiction because it allows me to live more lives than just this one.

Karen A. Chase

The longer I don't write, the more I hurt.

Naomi Wood

No one ever tells you that: that there’s no method. Writing’s a lawless place.

Naomi Wood

Writing is capturing life, recording the human condition, and trying to glean meaning from it.

Joni M. Fisher

Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.

Sara Sheridan

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

Chila Woychik

We know that those things to which we have an emotional connection stick with us better than those for which we have none. Dramatization is a way to get your intellectual ideas across to your audience emotionally.

Brian McDonald

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

Sara Sheridan

Artists strive for perfection. But what they often fail to see is that the beauty, the humanity, lies within the flaws.

Elizabeth Isaacs

The author relates that the word "OBSCENE" springs from the concept in Greek drama that certain actions would be performed outside the scene or off the stage. He clarifies that the Greeks did not shy away from shocking actions, but they knew that portraying them in the audience's view would drown out the emotional subtlety of the character development and ethical dilemmas.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

I will break your heart over a fucking library card.

Patrick Rothfuss

What do you feel like you SHOULD be doing instead of writing? IF you have an answer, then you have guilt. The "should" of life are always linked to guilt.

Andi Cumbo-Floyd

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

John Hughes

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

G.K. Chesterton

A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

K. Sean Harris

Writers are like actors too. For every story we create, we must get under the skin of the characters and role play with our writing.

Jyoti Arora

Show me the contract.

Buffy Andrews

Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.

Common

Writing is easy. Writing is hard. It's a breeze and a struggle, just like life.

Dennis R. Miller

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

Deana J. Driver

Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head.

Christy Hall

Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.

Brian A. McBride

Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates.

Christy Hall

My mother, who is a pianist and a fine artist, purchased a piano for me. Twice. This was back when I was a small girl. Pianos, of course, came complete with the quintessential piano teacher who whacked my hand with a stick each time I struck the wrong key. I learned a few pieces, yes, but eventually my pen compelled me to write too much and the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind compelled me to climb trees too often. Sorry mom. Coincidentally, books come from trees and flipping the pages sounds like wind through leaves... hhhmmmm... I guess I’m still just climbing trees now, but in a different way!

C. JoyBell C.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I'm a grown up, they call me a writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

Jebreel Nahaary

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

Jebreel Nahaary

Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.

M. Kirin

There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.

Amélie Nothomb

Previous 1 … 9 10 11 12 13 … 122 Next

Writing Quotes - Page 11

Related Topics