Writing Quotes - Page 79

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

Voltaire

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

Joan Didion

The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop.

L.M. Montgomery

Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.

Hélène Cixous

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

Umberto Eco

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart...

Haruki Murakami

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.

Rebecca Solnit

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

Mirra Ginsburg

You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

Markus Zusak

Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.

Paulo Coelho

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

William Styron

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

Christina Westover

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

Tiffany Madison

Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.

Pascal Quignard

To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.

Gerard de Marigny

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

John Steinbeck

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

Vincent H. O'Neil

It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.

L.M. Montgomery

Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.

Linda Nelson

murder your darlings

Arthur Quiller-Couch

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

Lauren Willig

Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.

Manuel Rivas

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

Edward Abbey

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Annie Dillard

Novel writing is like heroin addiction it takes everything you've got.

James N. Frey

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you.

J.D. Salinger

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

Geoff Dyer

Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.

Isabel Allende

That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.

Vincent H. O'Neil

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

Mary Pipher

but when i write, i feel like the most important man in the world, because when i write, i give meaning to things. i create significance, and i create meanings, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important in the long run than life and death.

Elliot Mabeuse

A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.

A. Lee Martinez

For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick.

Christopher Hitchens

I'd been writing for as long as I could remember, but once I read Otherworld, I'd stopped writing original stories to focus on fan fiction. It was such a rich, exciting world that I couldn't think of writing anything else.

Allison van Diepen

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

Haruki Murakami

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

Umberto Eco

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life, in understanding and in creating. There is no measuring in time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

Theodora Goss

If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

Bernard Malamud

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Garth Nix

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

J.R.R. Tolkien

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

Theodora Goss

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

Jeanette Winterson

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Connie Willis

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

Darlene Craviotto

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.

Haruki Murakami

We writers are a crazy group. I can't think of any other profession where the actual work is deep within, uncomfortable, and wanting out.

C.J. Heck

... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

Mike Bryan

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

Lettie Prell

Creative exhaustion is first cousin to writer’s block. First off, I try to accept that when it hits, I am not wasting time, but preparing myself to return to work. I blog more. I do something different, like answering this question. If I can’t force myself to finish a story, then perhaps it was not worth finishing. If I have to push rather than let it flow, it won’t be as good as if I take more time, mess around in the garden and try to shove the guilt deep into the compost pile. I am still a writer so long as I am thinking!

Sue Isle

Writing is like life: it goes on.

Marty Rubin

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

William S Burroughs

Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

L.L. Barkat

Persistence can look a lot like stupid.

Kristen Lamb

It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.

Kristen Lamb

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.

Linda W. Yezak

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

Janet Burroway

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

Ann Patchett

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Writing Quotes - Page 79

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