Writing Quotes - Page 80

Everything I've written up to this point is crap. Now I'm going to write the real one

Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.

William Strunk Jr.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

Roy Peter Clark

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

Louisa May Alcott

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

John Patrick Lowrie

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above all else, she didn't care what other people thought about her. But after a while, she started to take on a personality of her own, and I was suddenly more interested in her story than I was in mine.

Caitlin Elyse

Silently I dance a dance of chaos to the rhythm of a dying sun

Wayne Howell

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

Roland Barthes

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Alain de Botton

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

Ngaio Marsh

In older myths, the dark road leads downward into the Underworld, where Persephone is carried off by Hades, much against her will, while Ishtar descends of her own accord to beat at the gates of Hell. This road of darkness lies to the West, according to Native American myth, and each of us must travel it at some point in our lives. The western road is one of trials, ordeals, disasters and abrupt life changes — yet a road to be honored, nevertheless, as the road on which wisdom is gained. James Hillman, whose theory of 'archetypal psychology' draws extensively on Greco–Roman myth, echoes this belief when he argues that darkness is vital at certain periods of life, questioning our modern tendency to equate mental health with happiness. It is in the Underworld, he reminds us, that seeds germinate and prepare for spring. Myths of descent and rebirth connect the soul's cycles to those of nature.

Terri Windling

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

Anne Lamott

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

Barbara Kingsolver

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Friedrich Nietzsche

♔ Writing is my passion. I never want to let it go. It may be short, Fan-Fiction or purely my own work. But it is my kingdom, I am the princess. For all the noble readers in the kingdom, I bring them joy with tales. My knights that protect me, are my fellow writers. The dragon would be the inspiration for my writing. The fortune teller would be my best friend, giving me hope. The castle would be Wattpad, it keeps everything protected. ♔

BritHoran

Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that's too much pressure and you'll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.

scavola

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

David Foster Wallace

It is strange to hear my wordsRead back to me.I don't think I wrote themTo have them ever leave the page.I think I only writeWhat happens across my brainWhen my feet are too weary To dance anymore.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]

George Sand

...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...

John Geddes

That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure—the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]

Alexander McCall Smith

At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another.

Leo Tolstoy

I kill my loneliness by reading and (then) writing, damn.

Desi Puspitasari

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

Jorge Luis Borges

Ah, I do so love this charmingly rustic, elvin kingdom!-Baozhai

Mar Mai

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

Charles Bukowski

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

Joseph Campbell

If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.

Gregg Olsen

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

Gertrude Stein

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way., Nov. 20, 2009]

Cormac McCarthy

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Oscar Wilde

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Neil Gaiman

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)

Dorothy L. Sayers

I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I’d met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read “you can’t break me’”—bold and in italics.

Nadège Richards

A key and a strangler - this is all a simple tale requires.

Steve Aylett

I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.

Robert Ludlum

Sometimes, God doesn’t send you into a battle to win it; he sends you to end it.

Shannon L. Alder

Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all.Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well.The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants." magazine, March 1903)]

Jack London

Have you ever pondered the miracle of popcorn? It starts out as a tiny, little, compact kernel with magic trapped inside that when agitated, bursts to create something marvelously desirable. It’s sort of like those tiny, little thoughts trapped inside an author’s head that―in an excited explosion of words―suddenly become a captivating fairytale!

Richelle E. Goodrich

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Annie Dillard

I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.

John Fante

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.

Jonathan Safran Foer

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Robert McKee

And so I just kept writing to myself.

Kimberly Novosel

Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, "Hi. Thanks for writing me!

Alvi Syahrin

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

Elias Canetti

Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Ernest Hemingway

Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she'd written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time.

Lisa Scottoline

[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.

William Lawrence Bragg

Words are a puzzle put them together the right way and you get something beautiful.

Amy Joy

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose.

John Gardner

The hardest things to write are often the best things to read. And the most deserving to be written.

David Alejandro Fearnhead

Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

Chloe Thurlow

The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.

Larry Levis

Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.

Kit Reed

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.

Paula Vogel

What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.

Gail Sher

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Julio Cortázar

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon

Garrison Keillor

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Writing Quotes - Page 80

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