Writing Quotes - Page 75

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

When a character comes to life, it’s like meeting a new friend for the first time.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Aberjhani

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

Don Roff

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

Edward Abbey

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

Michael Chabon

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

William Meikle

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

Mark Twain

One Lifetime is not enough.

Maurice Northmore

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Brenda Ueland

Never let negativity derail your journey as a writer. Use the energy for your own betterment.

Guadalupe Neri

Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

Ursula K Le Guin

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

Jeanette Winterson

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

L.L. Barkat

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

Joanna Russ

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

G.K. Chesterton

(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")

W.B. Yeats

Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great......and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.

Holly Lisle

He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. ("Out Back")

Garry Douglas Kilworth

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

Ngaio Marsh

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

Theodora Goss

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.

Jack London

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

Ngaio Marsh

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

Grace Bridges

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

Victor J. Banis

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

Toni Cade Bambara

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Franz Kafka

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Neil Gaiman

So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.

N K Jemisin

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

Nikki Giovanni

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.

Charles Bukowski

It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.

Richelle E. Goodrich

It's in my blood, as magic is in yours." His mouth is still smiling, but his tone is somber. "I couldn't stop writing even if I wanted to.

Elora Bishop

Write when you least feel like it,Because that's when you write best.

Nema Al-Araby

Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.

Naomi Kinsman

Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.

Eric T. Benoit

I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!

Ashly Lorenzana

I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.

David Freeman Hawke

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

Jessica Lave

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

Piers Anthony

Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

P.D. James

It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.

Neil Gaiman

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

Umberto Eco

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 life.", email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)

T.C. Boyle

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

Anne Lamott

Content is King. Promotion is Queen

Bob Mayer

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.

Coco J. Ginger

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Stephen King

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

Theodora Goss

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.

Helen Oyeyemi

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.

William Faulkner

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. tIf someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say:t'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!

Anton Chekhov

drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

Samuel Beckett

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

Charles Bukowski

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Writing Quotes - Page 75

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