Writing Quotes - Page 70

Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.

A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.

Sterling Lord

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

Félix J. Palma

I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. We have an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and I think people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling.

Valerie Fitzgerald

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

Stephen Fry

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

E B White

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.

Katrina Monroe

Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn't hurt when you're done, you're probably doing something wrong.

Kevis Hendrickson

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians.When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer.Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.

Terry Tempest Williams

Writing is not just a process of creation. It is also a process of self-discovery

Cristina Istrati

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

Theodora Goss

Writing is a lot like making soup. My subconscious cooks the idea, but I have to sit down at the computer to pour it out.

Robin Wells

When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.", 6 March 2012]

Susanna Clarke

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference between, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while he,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,The abstract battle is concretely fought.The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,And thus it physically guides the phraseToward faint daylight through the inky maze. is agony! The brainIs soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the willCan interrupt, while the automatonIs taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.

Vladimir Nabokov

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

Vladimir Nabokov

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

Paul Auster

Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.

Criss Jami

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.

James Robertson

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Edna O'Brien

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.

Joe Queenan

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.

Alexei Maxim Russell

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

Stephen King

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.

Terri Windling

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Dejan Stojanovic

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

Linda Olsson

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

George Orwell

Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.

Peter James West

[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.

Félix J. Palma

Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?Byron:Make a departure.Gutman:From yourself?Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!

Tennessee Williams

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

John Steinbeck

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Ann Patchett

Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls. These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment. Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting. It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning. It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet. Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl. Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues. A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.

Richelle E. Goodrich

How many things can I do without?

Socrates

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

Haruki Murakami

In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That's why writing female characters is so much fun. They're not GUYS at all.

Kimberly Black

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.

Jonathan Harnisch

Being an artist doesn't take much. Just everything you got. Which means of course that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it completely, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

Hubert Selby Jr.

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

P.G. Wodehouse

Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.

Cheryl Alleway

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

Stephen King

The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.

Vera Nazarian

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.

Alistair Cross

I think maybe today a poem I hopeafter breakfast I start tryingpulling it out of my own gutmostly by force

John Thomas Idlet

Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)

Christopher Lehman

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

Diane Setterfield

I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that's like gardening in the basement. I don't publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue.

J.R. Tompkins

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?", December 31, 1989)]

Ken Kesey

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love.You think?I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half-life of love is forever. You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Junot Díaz

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

Wallace Stegner

The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.

C. Kennedy

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

John Dufresne

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

Bret Easton Ellis

Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

Claire Fuller

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

Eudora Welty

Words and magic are two powerful forces that can change the world.

Amy Neftzger

I cry often. I cry and cleanse my face with my tears and swim to the center of it all. A center that I have written about a thousand times, forever etched into the porcelain.

A.P. Sweet

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Howard Mittelmark

The internet is killing the art of writing. The big "publish" button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!-

Bangambiki Habyarimana

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Writing Quotes - Page 70

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