Writing Quotes - Page 9

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started.

Gudjon Bergmann

I am an Author a person who plays with words so they can dance in the minds of others

Stanley Victor Paskavci

I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point.

Joanna Penn

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

Jorge Luis Borges

Failing to writer everyday doesn't mean that you've given up, though a chapter a day - keeps writers block away!

David Batterson

Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.

Samuel Johnson

That's a good point," Professor Hirota said. "But there is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and the right to do just the opposite of what the circumstances dictate. The trouble is, we have this odd habit of thinking that men and light both act according to mechanical laws, which leads to some stunning errors. We set things up to make a man angry, and he laughs. We try to make him laugh, and again he does the opposite, he gets angry. Either way, though, he's still a human being."Hirota had enlarged the scope of the problem again."Well, then, what you're saying is, no matter what a human being does in a particular set of circumstances, he is being natural," said the novelist at the far end of the table."That's it," Hirota shot back. "It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human actions or behavior. It's the writer's fault if we don't believe in his characters as human beings.

Sōseki Natsume

Bernard of Clairvaux shared with Goethe and Balzac the art of charging narratives with his own charisma (and this is probably the only context in which those three names can be mentioned in one breath). On the surface self-representation was not the purpose of such narratives; they presented themselves as fiction or as commentaries on scripture. Let me suggest the word 'autography' to describe the process. 'Autography' is writing yourself into your own composition, not by describing yourself, but by infusing your own presence into it. The reader feels your presence, but sees someone or something else.

C. Stephen Jaeger

And you out there: Aren’t you somehow right here with me?

Garth Risk Hallberg

Authors can alter your life.

Bernard Kelvin Clive

Well, let me try again,' he said. 'If it be true, and no doubt it is, that the proper study of mankind is man, it is also true that man is best studied in the books that he has written about himself; and all books, whatever their subject matter, are in essence autobiographical... Wherefore, it is clear - or is it? - that writers of books are what I have called them, the most fascinating people in the world.

Peter Ruber

I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

Libba Bray

I've always said "Writer's Block" is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.

Julie Ann Dawson

Some men are born to be good some born to be badAs for me I only came with just a pen ‘n’ a pad.

Carlos Salinas

I know one thing for sho Heaven’s gotta have a ghettoCuz where else in death do I get to go?

Carlos Salinas

Don’t ever undermine writers for life is much about writing and memories are well kept through writing

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It's not a job but a condition.(Alan Garner on writing)

Alan Garner

You'll be amazed how much you have in common with Edith Wharton (who struggled to feel worthy of success), Louisa May Alcott (who badly needed money), Madaleine L'Engle (who could have papered an entire house with her rejection letters) and other writers...

Nava Atlas

Writing is a conduit. It opens up a passageway into the past. Not just for the writer, but for the reader too. Both readers and writer are linked by the commonality of human experience.

Lang Leav

I am inspired to write, and I write to inspire.

R.L. Hemlock

I'll just say right here that whoever thought up the idea of paying dead white authors by the word should have a special place in hell with the rest of the sadists.

Heather W. Petty

I think inspiration is strongest when I find a balance between observation and participation. You can’t write about what it means to dance by watching from the bleachers.

Chelsey Philpot

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window.[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.]

Virginia Woolf

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

Leonard Woolf

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

Natalie Goldberg

i never begin my writings with talent. i begin them with strong emotions and liquor. they finish with talent.

Darnell Lamont Walker

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

Sara Sheridan

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

Stephen King

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.

Thomas Mann

It's no good writing if God hasn't given you talent. People will just laugh.

Ivan Turgenev

In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

Flannery O'Connor

As I go off into the big black abyss of my future, I have to admit that I am terrified and also a bit insecure in my decisions. But, I also realize that anyone who has ever gone off into uncharted waters must have felt similar to the way I feel now, which gives me a small ounce of comfort. I don’t know how to do what I am doing, I have no way of knowing if this is the right way or not. But I guess I’ll never know until I get there. So, this is me, being a pioneer.

Leigh Hershkovich

Writing my blog has saved me thousands on therapy.

Phil Cooke

My mind can be ugly. But when I read something of mine that I think is beautiful, I'm reminded mind can be beautiful too.

Lisa M. Cronkhite

Fantasy elevates ordinary and eternal problems of young people into stories via the language of myth. It turns “No one really knows me” into “I’ve got a secret identity.” It turns “I don’t understand why other people act the way they do” into “I’m trapped in a faerie realm.” It turns “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell” into “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell.” There are certain things in life that are glorious, and they are glorious for everyone. There are more that are hard, and they are hard for everyone. We like to see these things retold, but with dragons.

Erin Bow

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous

Rex Stout

For every laugh, there should be a tear.

Walt Disney Company

Writing is Like waking on Water, Seems not possible at all, But Only person Understand Who Feel the Walking Sound of Tears while felling from Eyes

Yaganesh Derasari

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

Guy Gavriel Kay

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

Richard Marius

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Octavia E. Butler

It's a way of clearing the palate. Kids come into the classroom with all this other stuff in their hands. If they write it down for 10 minutes they become much more available for whatever it is we want to do in the class.

Joan Countryman

However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.

W.G. Sebald

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.

Criss Jami

Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

Bell Hooks

I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.

T.C. Boyle

I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.

Donald Windham

I'm going to write a novel and get it published. I'm going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it.I'm going to do it because I have something important to say to the world.I refuse to let anything get in my way.

Randy Ingermanson

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

Roger Ebert

Good writing just isn't that common.

Eric Flint

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

Neil Gaiman

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

Guy Kawasaki

An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them.

Thomas McCormack

Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

Markus Zusak

Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.

Noah Lukeman

Step back and scrutinize your work, to delve deep into the meaning behind the words, it will get both easier in some ways and harder in others. Either way, you need to practice everyday. You will probably get faster with time, because you learn to do this instinctively, and the writing may flow better on some days more than others, but it doesn’t get easier. And if you aren’t writing everyday, you are doing yourself and your craft a disservice. Writing is a habit. Get into the habit.

Darynda Jones

If you can master the opening, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

Darynda Jones

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Writing Quotes - Page 9

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