Writing Quotes - Page 43

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.

Anaïs Nin

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

Cynthia Ozick

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.

Minae Mizumura

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

John Green

... endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their difference in quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.

Marcel Proust

The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty.

Elena Ferrante

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

Johnny Rich

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

Johnny Rich

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's Writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

Stephen King

Life is a book. We are writing the stories of our lives.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

Jonathan Franzen

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

These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

Robert Louis Stevenson

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

James Lee Schmidt

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

Jorge Luis Borges

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

Harold Bloom

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

Jorge Luis Borges

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.

Philip Zaleski

Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.

E.L. Konigsburg

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

Paul Kalanithi

Will I ever see the mountains or am I doomed to roam the flatlands?

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

Joan Didion

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.

Guy de Maupassant

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Natalie Goldberg

Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it.

Ron Brackin

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

Oscar Wilde

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Thomas C. Foster

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

Robert Macfarlane

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

Robert McKee

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.

Kilroy J. Oldster

He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]

Deborah Kerr

It is not enough for the hand to touch a book and turn its pages. The pages of a book must touch the heart.

J.E.B. Spredemann

Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.

Tobias Wolff

Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]

Maxwell Perkins

The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary.... You once told me you were not a natural writer—my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this. [about The Great Gatsby]

Maxwell Perkins

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance.

Washington Irving

6 criteria to upgrade literary production; Correct language, the power of the idea, the fluency in expressing, the connection between ideas and the depth of their meanings, the characters movements towards high convictions whether in the beginning or in the middle, and the ending must serves ideals and values and accomplishes victory to the human beings.

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt in schoolBut, life being short, we rarely read their poems,Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,While those opinions which rank them high are basedOn a wish to be different or on lack of taste.

Louis MacNeice

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.

Gustave Flaubert

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Mark Twain

When you've got a thing to say, Say it! Don't take half a day.When your tale's got little in itCrowd the whole thing in a minute! Life is short--a fleeting vapor--Don't you fill the whole blamed paperWith a tale which, at a pinch, Could be cornered in an inch!Boil her down until she simmers,Polish her until she glimmers.

Joel Chandler Harris

Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial...a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.

James Kisner

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.

Roberto Bolaño

there are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitionersof them

David Morrell

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b

Vladimir Nabokov

I write-down to speak-up.

M.K. Asante Jr.

If you want to be a successful writer you have to put your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard and put words on the page. Even shitty words are better than no words. You can go back and fix them later.

Liliana Hart

I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.

Criss Jami

Talent and work ethic are nothing without belief.

A.D. Posey

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.

Niall Williams

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of

T.C. Boyle

Everyone’s life is an evolution of emotions, spirit and beliefs. The storyline changes, plots thicken, main characters mature and new spiritual journeys begin. This is true of inspirational authors. Their books represent only the stages of their life. New triumphs of the soul have yet to be written!

Shannon L. Alder

Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way.

Jessica Soffer

The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by. Arising unchained.No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation. Arising honestly. The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away. Pen in hand...Arising to write the next chapter.(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey)

Shannon L. Alder

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Gary Shteyngart

Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.

Alan McCluskey

Let us make sure that future generation writes our biography.

Amit Kalantri

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?

Sara Sheridan

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Writing Quotes - Page 43

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