Writing Quotes - Page 2

Yet should there hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,Which into words no virtue can digest.

Christopher Marlowe

I truly don’t understand why at every Q and A, someone always asks, “Do you have a routine?” or “Do you write every morning?” Why those questions remain interesting, I really have no idea. But since no one’s putting a gun to their head to ask them, they must compel. They’re probably necessary on a symbolic level more than a literal one, as people cobble together an imagination of what a life devoted to “making” might be like.[I think people want a path to follow. They want a checklist so they can say, “Alright cool, so if I get up at six and I write for this long and I watch this film and I do that…”]It’s weird, because I might have wanted that, too. I used to dance in New York. My Lower East Side days. Modern dance, or whatever. One thing I learned as a dancer was that people learn combinations different ways. Some people, if they get the right side, they can also get the left side right off the top of their head. Some people need to be taught both right and left. Some people count, some people never count, you know? I noticed then that, for me, it was really watching the whole person dancing, trying to take in the whole combination at once, that helped me learn it. I think I’m the same way as a reader—I like to take in the whole book, not getting too specific about how they did it, but ride the bigger example.I mean, at the end of the day, the answer to the question “How did you do it?” is right there, on the page. They’re showing you how they did it, by doing it. Maybe it’s different with art, when you don’t know if someone had all their sculptures knitted or welded by elves somewhere, but with writing, the answer to the question “How do you write a book like this?” is usually, “Like this” [points to book].

Maggie Nelson

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

Charles Bukowski

A person whom works exclusively for money places a price tag on his or her soul. A person whom labors to attain fame seeks a false form of adulation. The writer ignores the lure of a glamorous life by seeking to penetrate the darkness of their own being and meditate the larger issues that frame existence. A seeker knowingly follows a path that is barren, bleak, desolate, and unproductive in terms of attaining recognition and exulted social and financial status.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petting the KAT keeps it purring.

Don Roff

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

Sara Sheridan

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

John C. Bean

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.

Philip Zaleski

That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.

Hélène Cixous

when i write of you, my deari am holding youin the most exquisiteways.

Sanober Khan

No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Wait," Charlotte said. "I'd like to say something, if I may, Papa." He nodded, and Charlotte stood. Her siblings were still looking very grave. She hoped they were in the proper frame of mind to hear what she had to say, especially Branwell. "I have been thinking a great deal about ... My stories." She nodded significantly to them, willing them to understand that she was not talking about writing so much as about crossing over. "Papa was very wise when he called my writing a childish habit, and I think he understands that, for me, its a dangerous one as well." The small square of paper that had caused such consternation lay in front of her on the table. Now she took it up and held it out, looking at each if her siblings in turn. "Emily. Anne. Branwell." She ripped the paper in half. Emily gasped. " I am renouncing my invented worlds and all who live there. If any of you are in the grip if a similar childish habit"- she raised an eyebrow at her brother - "I challenge you to do the same.

Lena Coakley

Writing is exposing yourself to strangers

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

Flannery O'Connor

Honesty is vulnerability. Sadly, not everyone can handle someone’s honesty. However, lying allows people to be comfortable.

Shannon L. Alder

Honesty is easier when you have no face and no real name. And honesty, for me, is very easy on paper.

Katherine Reay

There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.

Robert Brault

Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.

Laurie Seidler

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

W Somerset Maugham

Sometimes, I marvel at the wonderof how graceful words seem to appearpen to paper; in others' handsAnd I think to myself-oh, how obsolete my existence is,to be unable to do the same.

Joy Chua

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

Cucuk Espe

No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

Anne Sexton

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

Dan Brown

His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)

Herbert A. Wise

We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.

Justin Alcala

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Roman Payne

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

Brad Leithauser

The only way to be inclined to write is to write to your inclination.

Terry Lander

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Helen Bevington

Subtlety is the mark of confidence and is thus by far the hardest thing for a writer to achieve.

Noah Lukeman

I didn’t need to be a writer to know that I could. Did you have to become a penis to act like a dick?

Crystal Woods

In days long past, Jarod said he’d write a sentence about my love, translated in Russian, and that sentence, like my love, is clearly not for sale, unlike his virginity, or this book, which I’m both offering at ten times the market value, so hurry up and buy now, before it goes down.

Will Advise

We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.

David Cronenberg

I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance.

Robin Sacredfire

My writings are the mirror of my soul and the dance of my mind.

Debasish Mridha

The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

We are inspired by divine power to write.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I've finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed

Criss Jami

Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust.

Oliver Markus Malloy

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

Sara Sheridan

I think it is because I have a habit, when I am bored or disgusted with people of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door. People resent this -- I suppose it is only natural to resent a door being shut in your face. They call it slyness when it is only self-defense.

L.M. Montgomery

And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.

S.A. Tawks

I always strive to create a setting that leaves the readers' imagination room to roam. That way, every reader sees the story through their own eyes.

P.S. Bartlett

If you do not write the thoughts of the moments, it is lost forever.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.

A.S. Neill

Oil may run out, liquidity may dry up, but as long as ink flows freely, the next chapter of Life will continue to be written.

Alex Morritt

Before the house-maid had lit the fire the next day, or the sun gained any power over the cold, gloomy morning in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling against one of the window-seats for the sake of all the little light she could command from it, and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her.

Jane Austen

A book about books is like a poem about poetry:Books are knowledge, paid for, all.Readers - horses in a stall.Stallions should always run.Lest they stale become, in turn.Running waters are most clear.In some books, you disappear –lose yourself, and track of time.How I wish that one was mine...Mine, to have, to write, to read...Mine, just like a flying steed.Mine, forever, - to improve.Would I then, of me, approve?I would not, I can't... myself.I'm but dust, swept off a shelf.Fly, can I, just 'til I'm settled,down, beside my flower, petalled.

Will Advise

My wishes before I die, to fulfill my mission on earth; The writing of my life stories to inspired present and future generations.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The grace of writing is upon me.I love writing. I write daily.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Poetry keeps mein a highly drunken stateof divinity.

Sanober Khan

Rules for navigating the net, Or people will roll their eye Lest you can't roll the R rect: Literally, don´t dink and dive!

Ana Claudia Antunes

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldn’t expect words to substitute for experience. That’s not their job, although words certainly can be misused in that way. The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be — and act — human.

Derrick Jensen

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

Ander Monson

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Sara Sheridan

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

Zaeema J. Hussain

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

Ernest Hemingway

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

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Writing Quotes - Page 2

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