Writing Quotes - Page 74

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.

Edward Abbey

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..

Geoffrey Hill

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

Virginia Woolf

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Samuel Johnson

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

Vincent H. O'Neil

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

Annie Dillard

(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest.

Celine Kiernan

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

Sandra Brown

I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

John Cheever

If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.

Don Roff

it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it

Alfred Lansing

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

Yevgeny Zamyatin

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Eudora Welty

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.

Truman Capote

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....

Anna Comnena

A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

Patty Smith

Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.

Quentin R. Bufogle

I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!

Christina Westover

I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead. Remember that I'm often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (it's tempting to call this the stadium of writing). It has a "something from nothing" quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture (107).

Moyra Davey

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

Beck

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

Jonas Eriksson

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

Christina Westover

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

David Mitchell

Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke’s gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things.

Douglas Bond

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it anything more than that is advertising.

Hanif Kureishi

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.

Sharon Delarose

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Paul Auster

But 'why then publish?' There are no rewardsOf fame or profit when the world grows weary.I ask in turn why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.It occupies me to turn back regardsOn what I've seen or pondered, sad or cheery,And what I write I cast upon the streamTo swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.

George Gordon Byron

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.

Ursula K Le Guin

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.

Maud Hart Lovelace

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!

C. JoyBell C.

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

Stephen King

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Umberto Eco

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Edward Abbey

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Stephen King

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Irwin Shaw

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.

James Joyce

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

Ernest Hemingway

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Follow the rules until you make them.

Luke Green

STRAUSS:Have you ever thought about putting those experiences into a book?RICHIE:I did decide to write about what i experienced in climbing to the top. And finally when I got there, I discovered what was at the top.You know what was there?STRAUSS: No, I don't.RICHIE: Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences that you had to get there.

Neil Strauss

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Margaret Jean Langstaff

There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.

Chuck Klosterman

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.

Shannon L. Alder

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.

Philip K Dick

The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.

Jonathan D. Spence

Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.

Arnošt Lustig

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.

John Bunyan

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

Walter Mosley

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)

Thomas Newkirk

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.

Richard Harding Davis

An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.

Shannon L. Alder

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Grace Paley

Writing is the great invention of the world.

Abraham Lincoln

A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run

Channing Pollock

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

R.J. Dennis

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

Lydia Davis

When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)

John Varley

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Writing Quotes - Page 74

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