Writing Quotes - Page 29

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.

C.S. Lewis

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

N.T. Wright

Clarity of thought is a must for brevity in speech.

Somali K Chakrabarti

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

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. Terrified of squandering our existence, we each seek to break out from our muteness and strike an accord with our brothers and sisters whom share our inherent desire to reach a global consilience.

Kilroy J. Oldster

If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice of hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, are among the signs which denote a civilized people – then the Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo.

Thomas Munro

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.

Sara Sheridan

For me, writing is just as much a choice as breathing. I can quit anytime I want, but not starting again would prove fatal.

Pamela Morris

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Margaret Atwood

I can taste fear, and lies, on a man's skin, Cavrax." The Master Priest whispered, watching the large pulse on the cleric's neck beat like a caged thing begging for release. "You're lying to me.

C.N. Faust

Traveled so far, and not yet have they come across anything of interest, he mused, except, of course, for that nest of goblins I managed to stir up. Indeed, his brother had always been a valiant fool; why not give him some excitement?He always did possess a love for a good fight, and who am I to deny him?The glass sphere, responding to his thoughts, zoomed in on the mountain nearby where Shrukian camped, and by putting both his hands on the sphere's sides and closing his eyes, Pharun could all but smell the power that radiated from its depths. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, and it awake all sorts of things inside of him. The power tasted of death and ash, and it was scalding hot, pouring down his throat like blood of the freshly dead. He did not need further searching to know what kind of power he was sampling.He smiled to himself, and it came out a satisfied smirk.

C.N. Faust

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.

Daniel J. Rice

Cuz even a gangsta rapper can find redemptionFor the sins committed before revelation.

Carlos Salinas

Tonight, I decided to take a stroll down to my local liquor store. Maybe I’ll find a refreshment to wash down this full moon. I hate showing up & the clerk fucking knows my name, perhaps because I’m a regular. Anyways got my shit, left…barely covering the tax. Took the long way home; to get away from that haunting typewriter. Sat down at some park bench, as I started to open my poison; A memory rushed into me. A empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the Christmas tree. I thought my dad would want another drink, so started to pour my bottle into the dirt & cried.

Brandon Villasenor

It's okay to be crazy as long as you keep writing and are happy.

Lori Lesko

I am content when writing short stories.

Sarah Mazucci

When I write, my soul sings.

Melissa Marsh

Even writing about rainbows makes me smile.

Anthony T.Hincks

Writing is a blurred mirror. Sometimes we work harder to see how we are reflected, but often we avert our gaze from the shadowy image.

Kristen Twardowski

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

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Natalie Goldberg

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

Mark Nepo

I was asked once why I write poetry. I said, why do you breath?

Shannon Lynette

I'm merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories

Michael Biondi

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

Sanober Khan

sometimes i am not sure.if i am writing the poemor the poemis writing me.

Sanober Khan

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, so what happens when the person's eyes are unavailable to look into? You read their words.

La Kata E.K.

They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?

Jason E. Hodges

Each morning the winds of the city moan and weep with lost souls clinging to hope of reliving the memories of yesterday.

Jason E. Hodges

You should be more carefulwhen you move, my dearwhat with you...spilling moonlightinto my poem, with a mereflick of your hand.

Sanober Khan

Poems arrive. They hide in feelings and images, in weeds and delivery vans, daring us to notice and give them form with our words. They take us to an invisible world where light and dark, inside and outside meet.

Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

These poems are cupsthat I pour my love into.Here, Drink!

Kamand Kojouri

Never be an artist that starts worshiping yourself or believe your little group is better than anyone outside of it. For, you are nothing more than a grain of sand on a hillside in this world of ours. Even Da Vinci’s work is only glanced at then scrolled past on a phone or computer these days. Climb down off your throne and become humble once more.

Jason E. Hodges

The sacred soul writes the sacred words.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I've been through so many things in life, and I have come to deduce one thing above all else: I care for nothing in this world save writing, books, everything else is an obstruction; it will always come second.

Ndiritu Wahome

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

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

Alain de Botton

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.

J.J. Scarisbrick

Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review is what got me started reading Tolstoy in the first place. How can anyone write without using metaphor and simile? That would be like—never mind.)

John Mark Reynolds

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

Joseph J. Ellis

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

V.S. Naipaul

As a writer, my job is to change your perspective, and make you think outside the box.

Mary Sage Nguyen

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

Flannery O'Connor

I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. But suppose I failed? Suppose I had lost all of my beautiful talent? Suppose it had burned up in the fire of Biff Newhouse smashing my nose or Helen Brownell dead forever? What would happen to me? Would I go to Abe Marx and become a busboy again? I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:“The time has come,” the Walrus said,“To talk of many things:Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages—and kings—”I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.

John Fante

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Philip Pullman

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser―in case you thought optimism was dead.

Robert Brault

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.

Stephen King

The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.

Shandy L. Kurth

You can never know enough about your characters

W Somerset Maugham

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

Dennis Covington

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

Ben Okri

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

Theodora Goss

I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique—nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts. It's a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the innumerable stories told throughout the ages, a distinctly new one rests on the tip of an author's pen.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Lisa Cron

Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.

Barry López

A daydreamer is a writer just waiting for pen and paper.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is tastounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered tbefore, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a ttrain, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, tpainted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls tup the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Ben Okri

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.

Mike Carey

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Writing Quotes - Page 29

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