Writing Quotes - Page 4

There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.

Saul Bellow

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

A.J. Liebling

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

Northrop Frye

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names identities personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

Mel Brooks

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.

Ernest Hemingway

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

Daphne du Maurier

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The beginning is easy what happens next is much harder.

Anonymous

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Robert Graves

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody but one whom nobody can imitate.

Francois Rene De Chateaubriand

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Barbara G. Harris

Begin with another's to end with your own.

Baltasar Gracián

Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.

Henry Herbert

Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

Samuel Johnson

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Henry Kissinger

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

William Stafford

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

William Stafford

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Charles Darwin

In Ireland a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

Anonymous

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

W.H. Auden

Make'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait.

Charles Reade

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

George Meredith

No tears and the writer no tears and the reader.

Robert Frost

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.

Philip Guedalla

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.

C. C. Colton

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

Thought flies and words go on foot.

Julien Green

I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Nancy Banks-Smith

A childhood filled with adventures, happiness and unabated love.If only I could remember ...

Lynda Fisher

Writing is my passion. It’s in my blood like a talent is. Like dancing, or singing, or drawing, I write. I can never stop writing. It helps me to express everything I’m afraid to talk about out loud when I need to say it the most. It’s my pacifier in a way...

Melissa C. Hamilton

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor.

Coleman Dowell

It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

Katie Roiphe

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Martin Amis

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Ralph Ellison

...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...

John Geddes

Her face was as red as her hair. “What are you doing,” she cried. Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. “Editing your paper.” What did it look like he was doing?“You’re just cutting out stuff!”“What do you think editing is?

M.M. John

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books.

Andy Seven

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru

Colm Tóibín

I keep being told that my writing is getting better and better. - Now, at first I am thrilled by that, but then I think, Isn't everybody's? Do some authors grow cozy with their own style, and stay there?I think of writing fiction as an art form. As such, it's a constant exploration of new and developing ideas. If any of my books were much like my others, I don't think I'd even bother to write them.

Edward Fahey

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

Peter Matthiessen

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

Will Self

Do you want to know how to write novels? I’ll tell you the secret: start on page one and keep going, in order, until you come to the last page. Then stop.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual

John Irving

Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.

David Beaty

I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Teju Cole

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?

Joss Whedon

I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength.[From a 1986 Fangoria interview]

James Cameron

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

Sara Sheridan

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Christopher Hitchens

Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.

Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Roland Barthes

...what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.

Stephen Koch

The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.

Holly Lisle

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” —Allen Ginsberg, WD

Jodi Woody

The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.

Harold Holzer

Writing is the painting of the voice.

Voltaire

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Writing Quotes - Page 4

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