Writing Quotes - Page 7

Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.

Guy Debord

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

Charles Bukowski

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.

Cheryl Strayed

I was a late bloomer. I was still naïve about what 16 year olds today have known for years. I remember sitting up and taking notice—of the world, my body, others—in a way never before experienced. I noticed boys, or rather they noticed me, at 16.

Chila Woychik

There is no fact or fiction, only imagined truths.

Mark Piper

Ideas are not in textbooks and journals, Ideas are more deeper than the shallow written works of men. You are the idea that comes like an idea.

Michael Bassey Johnson

The nature of immortality is a mystery,' he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.' But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.

Robin Sloan

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.

William Faulkner

Writing is a leap of faith. But how wonderful that the person you're putting faith in is yourself.

Jessie Burton

I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense.

Stephen King

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo

Helen Dunmore

Why shouldn’t I? I demand silently. Why shouldn’t I become a famous writer? Like Norman Mailer. Or Philip Roth. And F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway and all those other men. Why can’t I be like them? I mean, what is the point of becoming a writer if no one reads what you’ve written?Damn Viktor Greene and The New School. Why do I have to keep proving myself all of the time? Why can’t I be like L’il, with everyone praising and encouraging me? Or Rainbow, with her sense of entitlement. I bet Viktor Greene never asked Rainbow why she wanted to be a writer.Or what if-I wince-Viktor Greene is right? I’m not a writer after all.

Candace Bushnell

In this age where people can become famous without doing anything, we are now encouraging a literary and publishing atmosphere where you must become famous before you can do anything.

Daniel R. Thorne

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.

Henry Fielding

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.

Will Leitch

The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends....

Hunter S. Thompson

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter.

Rick Bragg

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing t

David Halberstam

For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).

Philip Sington

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

Jane Yolen

Art does what reality cannot.

Jayme K.

Words are drops of blood, from my heart.

Jean Kenyon MacKenzie

A mist rises from a nearby mound. It could be me, that mist, or simply the caretaker’s mower-dust. If the breeze blows just right, I’ll ghost your solid, entwine your hair. Promise me you won’t shampoo, but carry me along, tiny dust-particles of me.

Chila Woychik

I’ve never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that’s enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.

Chila Woychik

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Oscar Wilde

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Oscar Wilde

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

Tom Stoppard

He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

Terry Pratchett

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

Lawrence Lessig

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

Xi Chuan

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.

A.S. Byatt

If the world allows the people of Darfur to be removed forever from their land and their way of life, then genocide will happen elsewhere because it will be seen as something that works. It must not be allowed to work. The people of Darfur need to go home now. I write this for them, and for that day, ... and for those still living who might yet have beautiful lives on the earth.

Daoud Hari

Have you ever been writing something when you just forgot where you were, and what time it was, and you kept diving down deeper into your

Peter Gould

I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.

Chila Woychik

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

Harley King

Why use long words when short ones will do? Not all readers have been to college or university.

Ken Scott

Something good happened to my writing when stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn’t do something more complex. Don’t be confused by the word simple. Simple is not easy, it is clear voiced, and fearlessly elegant.

Carrie Newcomer

Write it down now! You may never know who will read it tomorrow!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Thomas Mann

He felt a deep urge to put some order in this chaos. Leaning against a large standing-stone by the wayside, he drew out his dreambook and began to write.

Alan McCluskey

Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.

Chuck Wendig

Words become sentences, twisted, difficult/The story weaves itself, always noisiest at night/As herds of words won't stop. . . "Wildebeest of Words/Breathe In

Eileen Granfors

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.

Julian Huxley

Luck is not fate. Believe it or not, it's largely an attitude.

Willis Turner

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.

Michael D. O'Brien

You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I’m sorry, but they’ve all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t make it out alive either, so I’m sure as hell not going to go to them for advice.

Charlotte Eriksson

In the Village IIIWho has removed the typewriter from my desk,so that I am a musician without his pianowith emptiness ahead as clear and grotesqueas another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.The notes outside are visible; sparrows willline antennae like staves, the way springs were,but the roofs are cold and the great grey riverwhere a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,moves imperceptibly like the accumulatingyears. I have no reason to forgive herfor what I brought on myself. I am past hating,past the longing for Italy where blowing snowabsolves and whitens a kneeling mountain rangeoutside Milan. Through glass, I am waitingfor the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginningof spring, but my hands, my work, feel strangewithout the rusty music of my machine. No wordsfor the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mangeof old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

Derek Walcott

Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold.

Faith Tilley Johnson

Writing is like talking to yourself, just in a way that makes it look like you're not crazy!

Mary Kate

If it pleases you and you can write at all, it's gonna please somebody else.

Charlaine Harris

I think... the most brilliant thing about being a writer is that if you don't like the way the world is, you can create your own.

Maegan Cook

Day dreaming is actually research for the next book.

Val Richards

Is this not the reason I write, to leave a piece of me behind?

Aisha Mirza

Creating something is only half the battle. The other half is finding people who care about it.

Ramsey Isler

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Market it with the persistence of a drug peddler.

Ashwin Sanghi

Effective marketing is saying the right thing to the right people at the right time.

Fenton

We have put our words on steroids and amped the language up so high that unless we communicate in overdrive and hyperbole, we believe--perhaps correctly--that nobody will hear us. In the process, we've sacrificed nuance and judgement and distinction, and thereby cheapened the conversation.

Frank Luntz

Writing a book is easy, getting people to read it is the hard part.

Jordon Sagel

As we write we summon little demons.

Neil Gaiman

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

Sherry Turkle

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Writing Quotes - Page 7

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