Writing Quotes - Page 15

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

Samuel S. Vaughan

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.

Cheryl L. Ilov

Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now,” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Being a writer, I think, is much like being a parent or a pet parent in my case. I love all of my characters equally, even if I want you to hate them, I love them. If you don't love all your characters you're not doing it right.

Ellie Elisabeth

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

William Inge

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Flannery O'Connor

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

Dani Shapiro

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Ann Patchett

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

Irvine Welsh

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Chigozie Obioma

A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.

Ben Tolosa

I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

M.V. Carey

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

M.V. Carey

A chef’s magic is his ingredients, how he can substitute one for another, then break with convention by changing it all around again without once referring to the recipe. And then just at the death complete the beauty by adding another element never previously thought of. Well words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation. Sometimes both the chef and the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.

Karl Wiggins

When you hurt one of your characters and then type faster to finish a scene while saying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!

A.R. Fagundes

By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer’s vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

Chris Baty

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.

Hanya Yanagihara

I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.

Carla H. Krueger

The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?”She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.”“What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her.“Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied.“Choices,” he echoed.“Of who they become.

Nancy Holder

Love is the best drug, bar none.

Crystal Woods

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.

Doris Lessing

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Pat Conroy

Editors are licensed to be curious.

William Zinsser

For Tolstoy . . . anything that human beings do has its glory. . . . I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.

Mark Van Doren

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

Thomas Swick

My between-books strategy was reading voraciously and on a whim.

Erik Larson

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it.

Davis Miller

His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.

H.W. Brands

Writing is taking human experience and wrapping it up into a package of your own ideas and hoping someone will pull the bow smiling on top to see what's hiding inside.

Roderick Vincent

Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. -

Thomas Mann

The greatest compliments I’ve ever received were complaints from readers that I made them stay up all night reading.

H.E. Fairbanks

She would keep playing the role of the winner as long as the audience believed her.

Mary Papas

You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better

Mary Papas

Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.

John Gardner

Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?A: Explaining what that is.

Christy Hall

Writing something new is an effective way to get rid of writer's block. Or you can observe the people around you and fantasize like I do.

B.A. Gabrielle

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

K.M. Logan

Write as though your life depended on it.

Jill Telford

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

Katherine Paterson

Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.

Christy Hall

You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!

Christy Hall

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

William Trevor

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

Laurence Sterne

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

Herman Wouk

Write like a motherfucker.

Cheryl Strayed

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

George Orwell

We live and breathe words...but writing them down makes you escape into new worlds. Only those who write would understand.

April Mae Monterrosa

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, ... I was there on the page

Jenny Moss

Write something worth reading and your voice will be heard.

Teresa Mummert

Write what you know. Write what you can't forget. Write to give yourself courage and others hope.

Nikki Rosen

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

Christy Hall

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

Ted Solotaroff

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Writing Quotes - Page 15

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