Writing Quotes - Page 119

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.

C. JoyBell C.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

Anne Tyler

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

John Updike

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

Erin Bow

Living is about capturing the essence of things. I go through my life every day with a vial, a vial wherein can be found precious essential oils of every kind! The priceless, fragrant oils that are the essence of my experiences, my thoughts. I walk inside a different realm from everybody else, in that I am existing in the essence of things; every time there is reason to smile, I hold out my glass vial and capture that drop of oil, that essence, and then I smile. And that is why I have smiled, and so you and I may be smiling at the same time but I am smiling because of that one drop of cherished, treasured oil that I have extracted. When I write, I find no need to memorize an idea, a plot, a sequence of things: no. I must only capture the essence of a feeling or a thought and once I have inhaled that aroma, I know that I have what I need.

C. JoyBell C.

A good idea always attracts other good ideas.

Patrick Ness

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

William S Burroughs

Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.

Violet Haberdasher

He who writes to his beloved every day is not a lover, but a writer.

Dr. Kyaciss Pfiell

Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more.

Anthea Syrokou

You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time.

Suzy Kassem

An entrepreneur with strong network makes money even when he is asleep.

Amit Kalantri

Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.

Amit Kalantri

To a farmer dirt is not a waste, it is wealth.

Amit Kalantri

If the farmer is rich, then so is the nation.

Amit Kalantri

A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.

Amit Kalantri

I wrote about the things I discovered along the way and about how whether we believe it or not, everything we need to succeed in life is already present inside us. We just have to find the few.

Andrew Kendall

Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.

Amit Kalantri

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

Amit Kalantri

Happiness keeps you Sweet , Trials keep you Strong, Sorrows keep you Human, Failures keep you Humble, Success keeps you Glowing, But Only faith Keeps You Going! Be Happy Live Simply.

Abhysheq Shukla

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

William Zinsser

The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.

Eric T. Benoit

The best kind of happiness is a habit you're passionate about.

Shannon L. Alder

Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit.

Guru Nanak

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

George Saunders

Old words are reborn with new faces.

Criss Jami

I don't trust men everybody likes. Being nice isn't the same as being good.

Sarah Rees Brennan

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Milan Kundera

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?

Theodor W. Adorno

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.

Michel Foucault

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

Clive Barker

Genetic code is a divine writing.

Toba Beta

I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny.

Emmuska Orczy

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

Shannon L. Alder

Your current circumstances are part of your redemption story He is writing.

Evinda Lepins

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.

William Blake

What are you burning?" On a glance, just some papers."I write in a journal." He spoke below his breath, so that his words weren't quite for me. "Because I like to see everything written down. So that I know it really happened. That I wasn't just making it up. Then I read it and memorize it. And then I have to destroy the hard evidence."I thought of my own journal, the muddle of every page. All those unfiltered, lunatic letters to Sean Ryan."What is it, exactly, that you need to destroy?""Everything that I don't want to be true.

Adele Griffin

Our willingness to write truthfully brings the story to life.

Alan Watt

The first duty of an Author is --- I conceive --- a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.--- Charlotte Bronte

Juliet Barker

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.

Wallace Stegner

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

John Irving

You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana

...the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?

Brenda Ueland

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

E.M. Forster

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Stephen King

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ...It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.

Nelson Algren

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two.

Alan Shapiro

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

Brenda Ueland

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

Haruki Murakami

A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.

Kevin Hood

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

Joan Didion

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)

Dorothy L. Sayers

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

Neil Gaiman

When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.

Anthony Kiedis

As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?

Criss Jami

I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. The adept handles the rich material, the rank river clay, and diligently intones his alphabetical spells, knowing full well the history of golems: how they break free of their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power, refuse to be controlled. In the same way, the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay with the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life, heedless of the danger to himself, eager to show his powers, to celebrate his mastery, to bring into being a little world that, like God’s, is at once terribly imperfect and filled with astonishing life.Originally published in The Washington Post Book World

Michael Chabon

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Writing Quotes - Page 119

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