Writing Quotes - Page 87

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

Don DeLillo

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

Ezra Pound

I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.

Christopher Vogler

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

Stephen King

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

Dashiell Hammett

lots of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation.The truth is we all are travellers in the life's eternal journey, to meet for a short while,to care and share but we tend to forget that nothing lasts forever.if only we could cultivate a sense of detachment,life would have been much easier.

Chitralekha Paul

When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.

Harlan Ellison

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.

Diane Setterfield

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

Bess Streeter Aldrich

Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three....

Pandora Poikilos

Crazy by definition isKnowing that true sanity isA figment of the educated mind

Caleb Warta

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

Eudora Welty

I write to be a part of something - a world made up of words and ideas, which are sometimes painfully criticized, gratefully loved and can never be destroyed.

Ashley Sanders

It's wonderful to look back at our old writing and cringe. It simply means we have grown and can write better now. And you found some parts you can be proud of, so when you throw the old writing on the floor and stomp on it, remember to celebrate those seeds of genius and be glad that you're still writing.

Jeanne Voelker

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

Terry Pratchett

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Junot Díaz

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

Nelson Algren

I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.

Laura Anne Gilman

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

Marie Brennan

Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.

Ben Monopoli

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

Annie Dillard

There's something terribly weird about the standard fantasy setting--not least of which the fact the phrase "standard fantasy setting" can be uttered without irony.

Yahtzee Croshaw

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

Mark Vonnegut

There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.

Amy Hempel

The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.

michael p naughton

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

W.H. Auden

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Mark Twain

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.

Italo Calvino

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.

Edna O'Brien

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Ray Bradbury

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader

Ernest Hemingway

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

Mickey Spillane

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Stephen King

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

Aldous Huxley

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

Manuel Puig

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Lee Benson

Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!

Ben Mikaelsen

IntoxicatedWith the madnessI'm in love withMy sadnessBullshit beggars, enchanted kingdomFashion victims through their charcoaled teeth

Billy Corgan

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

Richard Greenberg

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.

A.D. Posey

What is a writer?A writer is a magician who can create a masterpiece With a wave of a pencilA writer has the key to a new worldCapturing readers and taking them on a roller coaster ride away from realityBut a writer can be a commanding tyrantOr a hypnotist stealing mindsWhat is a writer?A writer is a powerful being, an intelligent thinkerAnd an artist creating mind pictures through words.A writer is a keeper of secretsOr like a roomful of words waiting for a bookBut a writer is also a puppet master taking controlWith no strings attachedWhat is a writer?A writer is a true friendUsing words to spread smiles to the worldA writer is…..The voice of the hear

Carol Archer

I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.

Felisberto Hernández

You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --

Charlotte Brontë

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

Italo Calvino

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Milan Kundera

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

Joseph Brodsky

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Stephen King

People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.

Roman Payne

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms:* Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives.* Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.* Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.* Do not put statements in the negative form.* Verbs has to agree with their subjects.* No sentence fragments.* Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.* Avoid commas, that are not necessary.* If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.* A writer must not shift your point of view.* Eschew dialect, irregardless.* And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.* Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!* Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.* Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens.* Write all adverbial forms correct.* Don't use contractions in formal writing.* Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.* It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.* If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.* Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.* Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.* Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.* Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.* Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.* If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.* Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.* Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.* Always pick on the correct idiom.* "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"* The adverb always follows the verb.* Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.", November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)

William Safire

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

Donald Miller

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.

E B White

I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.

Patricia C. Wrede

As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

Cornelia Funke

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

Tom Waits

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Eudora Welty

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

W Somerset Maugham

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

Julian Barnes

Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.

S.A.R.K.

Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

Jack Kerouac

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Writing Quotes - Page 87

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