Writing Quotes - Page 82

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Cory Doctorow

I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.

Jeanne Voelker

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

Paul Fussell

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Annie Dillard

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of. But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

Orson Scott Card

I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.

Jack McClelland

Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.

Jonathan Price

The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.

Washington Irving

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.

James Salter

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

Stephen King

I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is.

Lori R. Lopez

I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)

Jack McClelland

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Ring Lardner

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.

Ali Shaw

A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations.

C.K. Webb

Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.

Anneli Rufus

It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.

Philippe Claudel

It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

Stephen King

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

Ray Bradbury

One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.

Niyi Osundare

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'.

Raymond Carver

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

Joyce Carol Oates

In the country of the story the writer is king.

Shirley Jackson

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

Brenda Ueland

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I fix the cramped, lined pageswith my curious stare. How do youcome to exist?

Kiera Woodhull

I go silent so I can write. When my tongue is wagging my fingers are silent.

Sonia Rumzi

Writing is like baking cupcakes, you're trying to make something from the raw. Like with cupcakes it's flour and eggs and stuff, and with books it's ideas and words. The end result is the same though, you want people to eat them up.

Emma Shortt

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

Peter Straub

Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.

Banana Yoshimoto

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.

Natalie Goldberg

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

Linda W. Yezak

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...

A.S. Byatt

To breathe is to live, but to write unimpeded is to breathe eternal.

M. Clifford

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.

Walter Kirn

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

Lester Bangs

It's not how great the ideas are. It's about how you write them, to make them great.

Primadonna Angela

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.

Marty Rubin

Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.

Cameron Conaway

Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.

Ren Garcia

In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.

Jefferson Smith

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Katherine Paterson

When you write, you are telling a story...to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself...over and over again.

Kai Strand

Fiction is a great combination between experience and imagination.

Desi Puspitasari

Somebody is observing my writings, I know that.That's one reason why I keep reading and writing.

Toba Beta

What's so great about writing?" "You can make anything true

Adi Alsaid

Eating was still a sore point with Smriti.She failed to understand,when interesting options like mango juice or chocolates were available,why was she forced by her stupid mother to eat boring regular meals?After much contemplation,Nikhil came up with a suggestion'Don't give her food till she herself asks for it'.His idea'starve-to know-the-worth-of -food'made sense to Abhilasha,though it took her a great deal of resolve before she could actually try it out. So on a sunday,the'lady with an iron will'took over from'the soft and kind hearted mother'.she did not give her anything to eat and waited for the golden moment,expecting a hungry Smriti to beg for food.But the much awaited moment never came.Smriti was not at all bothered about her meal and kept playing happily. The day turned into evening and still there was no trace of hunger in her."Aren't you feeling hungry?' now a worried mother had no option but to eat the humble pie and ask the daughter."No Maa. My friend Pinky had brought wafers and chocolates. Those were so yummy that I ate them all......"And that was the end of her'starve-to -know-the-worth-of-food-mission.

Chitralekha Paul

Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.

Mark Leidner

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

Carl Sandburg

If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.

Tiffany Madison

That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

Kelly Barnhill

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

Ray Bradbury

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

David Morrell

A migraine is the cockblock of writing.

Don Roff

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway

I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken the story. It’s as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. . . .

Elvira Woodruff

I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.

Richard P. Denney

First and foremost, I am me. I'm real. I don't write to impress. I write to express.

RaeBeth McGee-Buda

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

Edgar Allan Poe

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Writing Quotes - Page 82

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