Writing Quotes - Page 18

Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.

When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.

Joanna Penn

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Karl Ove Knausgård

Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

Natalie Goldberg

The Four Stages of Writer’s BlockW.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can’t.W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can’t. W.B. Stage I: I don’t want to write but I have to.W.B. Stage I: I don’t have time for writing … and, honestly, I don’t feel like writing.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Life is about showing up, so is writing. That’s why I sit at my desk every day and dance my fingers across the keyboard

Laurie Buchanan

Writers are the wind that sail words across the page.

Laurie Buchanan

Yes, writing is that easy. Yes, writing is that hard. But if you want to do it you can. Only you can stop you.

R.M. Donaldson

Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story.

R.M. Donaldson

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

May Sarton

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

Julia Cameron

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

May Sarton

All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.

Michael Stutz

A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.

Kilroy J. Oldster

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

Allison K. Williams

Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.

Quinn Anderson

Always write as if you will never have the blessed chance to write again, so this has to be the best thing you've ever done. Do that, and it will be.

Joe Gores

What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled.

Charles Johnson

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…

Harlan Ellison

I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I’ll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.

Troye Sivan

Everyone, except a writer, thinks writing is easy. Writing is tough. Being a disciplined writer is tougher.

Tarang Sinha

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.

Flannery O'Connor

For the curious, I write

Veronica Purcell

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

Elena Ferrante

When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

Elena Ferrante

Dreams are there for those who dare to dream them.

R.K. King

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

Ernest Hemingway

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Graham Greene

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Eudora Welty

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Cynthis Ozick

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.

Catherine Carrigan

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

Grace Paley

In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.

R.M. Donaldson

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Authors, such as William Zinsser, Steven Pinker, Natalie Goldberg, and Stephen King, who have all written exquisite books on the art and craft of writing, have reminded me that it is the commitment to the craft that matters the most; the longing to get better and the countless hours of work that go into writing and rewriting. To them I am eternally grateful.

Gudjon Bergmann

Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is prone to perfectionism will likely never fin...

Gudjon Bergmann

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done. Most of it is not like fairy dust in the least.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own

Carla H. Krueger

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White? There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.

Karl Wiggins

writing is vulnerable is power is freedom.

Anna Quinn

Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.

Heena Rathore P.

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure

Karl Wiggins

Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk

Karl Wiggins

There is nothing to writing. You nourish your creativity for months and years until you release your baby out into the world.

Lydia Larue

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

Jo Baker

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

Igor Stravinsky

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

Louis L'Amour

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Stella Atrium

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.

Kayla Rae Whitaker

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable

Alfred Lansing

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.

John Rember

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Orson Scott Card

My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.

Pierre Berton

They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.

Andrew Barger

In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

Milan Kundera

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Writing Quotes - Page 18

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