Writing Quotes - Page 37

Be a great writer when you write your life's song.

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart.In your writing and your life.

The advice to "kill your darlings" has been attributed to various authors across the various galaxies... and Mister Heist hated them all.Why teach young writers to edit out whatever it is they feel most passionate about?Better to kill everything in their writing they DON'T love as much.Until only the darlings remain.

Brian K. Vaughan

It’s not so much about writing the story of Christmas itself, as ingenious as it is. In reality, it’s much more about writing the story of Christmas into the story of life so that it will become the story of life.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways.

Terri Windling

I think that thinking of our material universe, the one we perceive with our sense, as the only thing is not only foolish, it is arrogant. As well as, if I may add, in contradiction to theoretical physics. I believe — I have always believed — that there is meaning and purpose to life, although we may not understand that meaning and purpose. I think we catch glimpses of it here and there, and I honestly think that the universe communicates it to us, if we can listen for it — if our perceptions are finely enough tuned. All my life, I’ve had a strong sense of purpose, of being here for a reason that I might not at that moment understand, but that something, somewhere, understood. The times I’ve been unhappy in my life are when I’ve gone off the path, when I’ve realized that I made a choice taking me away from the way I was supposed to go. I remember what it was like to go to law school and to feel, so deeply that it went to my core, as though I was in the wrong place, as though I had stepped off the path. The path itself feels narrow and rocky, sometimes. Sometimes it feels as though I’m walking along a gulley, or a high cliff with winds. But it feels like a path, as though I’m going somewhere.I don’t know how to talk about this except by saying that we have instincts, and our instincts tell us these things, and we have to trust them.

Theodora Goss

I write because writing is power. Writing is creation. When you write, you are as a god, a deity wielding his pen like some Harry Potter staff, making whatever you want to happen, happen. By sheer force of will and some clever word placement, I can arrange all of these little symbols together to invoke emotions and ideas at a whim out of whosoever allows me to cast my spell. It does not take a man and a woman to create. It just takes a writer.

Jonathan Culver

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

Ray Bradbury

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.

Madeleine L'Engle

Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.

Leonie Swann

As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty.

Stephen King

Once you familiarize yourself with your tools, you should forget about them. It will only throw you off-balance. In all these ‘rolling shit into little balls’ types who spend hours of time and reams of paper saying nothing, literary masturbators, they concentrate on the vehicle more than what they want to produce. That impedes the end result and defeats the purpose. You must lose consciousness of the medium or mechanics to do the impossible. Like Nijinsky who explained how he gave the impression of hovering in mid-air – ‘I just pause when I get there.’ In a child-like way, real magicians innocently do the simplest thing. The objective is all they think about. I just want to make music the way I hear it. The ends justify the means, and the means become inconsequential.

Anton Szandor LaVey

I say I write to you, but, truth be told, I prefer the American idiom: I write you. I'll write you friends say, as if, in writing, someone could be caused to appear, as if writing were a spell, some form of conjuration. So, I write you to bring you here, bring you back.

Julian Wolfreys

I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the ‘writer’ in me and still one of my most loved places in the world. It was always peaceful there. Each and every moment I spent their searching for books or walking on unknown paths with the un-quenching thirst for knowledge, is cherished in my mind forever. The dark dusty corners all brown and the smell of old books untouched by readers for years, the quiet long walking passages between overloaded bookshelves were places where my magical world existed.

Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

Marguerite Duras

I believe in magic. Writing is my magic wand, and through my magic I create my own secret world, away from all these worries and responsibilities. Love, honesty and humanity is essential to enter this beautiful world of magic. I dwell among White magical peacocks, glowing unicorns, fire breathing turquoise dragons, talking trees, flying horses, talking wise jackals and wolves, crystal water falls, secret pathways hidden in urban gardens and books with doorways to secret worlds. You need to believe in magic to experience it.

Ama H. Vanniarachchy

Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.

Alan Moore

Live whatever draws out the magic within.

A.D. Posey

Once you realize life is magic, you will never look upon the world with dimmed eyes again.

A.D. Posey

Creating life with words is my favorite magic to weave.

Jen Golembiewski

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

Neil Gaiman

There are times when I'm writing where time feels irrelevant. Those are the moments I know I'm creating magic.

Anastasia Bolinder

As a writer, I do not treat writing merely as a profession but more of as my "calling" and my way of life. In every waking hour and even in my deep sleep, creativity and imagination crawls through my inner core. Anyone can write but not everybody can capture that crystalline moment when magic unfolds and casts a spell on her readers." - Author/Poet Elizabeth Esguerra Castillo

Elizabeth E. Castillo

You can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them. That's why you come here. To live your story.

Angela Banks

I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.

Cornelia Funke

Magic and mystery writing follow the same, time-tested, three-act structure to stage their drama; set the scene, build the suspense, reveal the answer. In magic, these phases are known as the pledge, the turn and the prestige.

Steve Burrows

When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of m

Susanna Clarke

I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

Dana Spiotta

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

Frank McCourt

If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I've suffered, how much I've been through, but most importantly how far I have come.

Tommy Tran

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Haruki Murakami

Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper.

Ivan Vladislavić

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

Tobias Wolff

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be

Mary Oliver

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final s

Alice Munro

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

E.M. Forster

Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard. By morning they're good and drunk and I pop them into a baggy, then take them outside and throw the little buggers away.

Bob Thurber

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of fish, and how we filleted them and the left the guts out for bears and eagles, and how those fish tasted fresh when we fried them over a fire.

Daniel J. Rice

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

Anna Smaill

Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.

Edmond Jabès

Dementia isn’t the only place that memories are found to be flawed—people find out they can’t rely on their memories every day. People blindsided in relationships. People who find out their truth is a lie. People pulled from trauma. People awakened, as in Anna and Eve. I wondered: If you can’t use memories to steer your life, what can you use? I didn’t know. It was why I had to write this book.

Sally Hepworth

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

Edmund Wilson

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

Sarah Manguso

Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.

Jackie Haze

The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

Charles Dickens

Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I write to prove that we lived. I write both to remember and to let go. I write because I can't stop, not until this horrible story of ours is over and we're safe at home.

Courtney M. Privett

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.

Rebecca Solnit

In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.

Minae Mizumura

He who writes is the martyr, seen through the eyes of the unassuming doll.

A.K. Kuykendall

We are inspired by divine power to write.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We are inspired to write by divine force.

Lailah Gifty Akita

You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early... Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!

Israelmore Ayivor

An anti-hero is just a villain you spend a lot of time with.

Matthew Catania

Do little things every day that no one else seems to want to do, be patient, and success will find you.

Brandi L. Bates

You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps.

michael p naughton

If you want things to change, you must change. If you want things to get better, you must get better.

Ted Atoka

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

Michelle M. Pillow

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Writing Quotes - Page 37

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