Writing Quotes - Page 19

I want my writing to bring people not just to think of "trees" as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.

Roger Deakin

Why fantasize about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable ... and, therefore, the inherently desirable.

Belle de Jour

It's a good thing, right, when an author gets turned on by the dirty scenes they write?!

Martha Sweeney

I write erotica: sexy, raunchy fiction with the goal of getting your mind tuned in and your body turned on! Looking forward to sharing my steamy stories!

Shayna York

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

Rafael Sabatini

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.

Steven Pressfield

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

Jeanne Marie Laskas

Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised."Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her."Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?""Writer," I said."Housewife," she said."Writer," I said."I'll just put down housewife," she said.

Shirley Jackson

This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You're not doing it right.

Elizabeth Strout

When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.

Carla H. Krueger

LEARN FROM THE MASTERS: Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.

Colin Nissan

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential.

Marietta Rodgers

I write humor as it's pretty much the only thing keeping me out of an asylum.

Bonnie Daly

Proceed with caution when you befriend a writer, for if you fall out of their good graces they have the delightful capability of doing any number of dastardly things to you upon the written page.

Bonnie Daly

He hiccupped and continued: "I write therefore I come...But unfortunately, my orgies are never eternal!...

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Honestly...this is why I write.I write to get the happy ending I sometimes feel is eluding me.I write for my sanity.

Debora Dennis

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything.

damali ayo

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

Sol Stein

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

Christa Wolf

There comes a time in a man's life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. 'All the perfumes of Arabia' makes you think of all the perfumes of Arabia and nothing more. It is the trouble with all metaphors where human behavior is concerned. People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments or anything else but people. Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.)

John O'Hara

I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.

Pat Conroy

The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.

Eugen Herrigel

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Eugen Herrigel

Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.

Eugen Herrigel

There is no apology for passion

Jennifer Renson

If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases.

Willa Cather

I feel like I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, But I've kept pretty stable. That's because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion as long as it's only a song. It works for me, and I don't want to change it. I don't have anything left for writing.

Jennifer Echols

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.

Anne Enright

Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

Margaret Atwood

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

Don Roff

What other than mental illness spurs normal people to write prolifically? The chief cause is not quite illness, but nearly: love, especially unhappy love.

Alice W. Flaherty

If your career doesn’t work out, write a book about it.

Marcy Sheiner

A book is not just a collection of words, it is a perception portrayed on blank sheets. You know, getting you the feelings of blowing winds and rains and sun and flowers around, the smiles, the tears, the notional links with the characters and make them all alive, while you read. And that's sure as hell a gruelling task !

Syed Arshad

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

Karl Wiggins

That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.

John Kenneth Galbraith

English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

Dean Wesley Smith

I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions.

Nell Stevens

Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.

Kenneth Atchity

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.

Geoff Ryman

The panther that has stalked yousince you were a childis old now. No longer wild,and tired of guarding the treasureyou yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to youif you just let her go.

Pat Schneider

Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

Pat Conroy

There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill the character, resurrect him, then kill him again.

Caris O'Malley

Josh Funk and Hunter Fraser: we haven't been in touch in years, but you made me feel like the funniest kid in the world. I would stay up late on school nights to write things to try to make you laugh the next day in class, and you inspired the one piece of advice on writing that I've ever felt qualified to give: write for the kid sitting next to you.

B.J. Novak

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

Richard Marius

A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

David Almond

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

Jack Kerouac

It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write book.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one’s home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood — an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again — and remind us that at the end of the journey we’re not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are ‘twice–born’ in our return to life, carrying seeds — new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit.

Terri Windling

In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.

Terri Windling

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Douglas C. Engelbart

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

Sara Sheridan

Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.

Debasish Mridha

Poetry is the beauty of life.

Debasish Mridha

Writing is an incurable psychological disease which only gets worse with writing.

Debasish Mridha

My purpose of writing is to express my love for you,no matter, who you are, where you live or whatever you do.

Debasish Mridha

I am writing just to inspire you, encourage you, empower you, and give you hope when you are fighting your life's battle.

Debasish Mridha

You are not responsible for the reader, you're only responsible for what you are writing.

Debasish Mridha

I am writing something very simple that will change you and change the world.

Debasish Mridha

Previous 1 … 17 18 19 20 21 … 122 Next

Writing Quotes - Page 19

Related Topics