Writing Quotes - Page 94

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Roland Barthes

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

Don Marquis

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.

Natalie Goldberg

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

Aaron Sorkin

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Karen Blixen

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

Oscar Wilde

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

Patricia Hampl

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

Stephen King

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Margaret Mahy

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Stephen King

Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you

Ginnetta Correli

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Dorothy Allison

I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.

Jake Black

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

Charlotte Brontë

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Geoff Dyer

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

Tom Robbins

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise

John Cleese

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

G.K. Chesterton

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Cormac McCarthy

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Ann Brashares

And ever, as the story drainedThe wells of fancy dry,And faintly strove that weary oneTo put the subject by,"The rest next time--" "It is next time!"The Happy voice cry.Thus grew the tale of Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!", May 10, 1886)

Anton Chekhov

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

L.M. Montgomery

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

Toni Morrison

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Roman Payne

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

Gary Shteyngart

I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I’m very well endowed.

Bauvard

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

Elmore Leonard

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural.

Laurie Halse Anderson

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Jeanette Winterson

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

Woody Allen

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

Paolo Bacigalupi

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

Roland Smith

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

Isabel Allende

You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.

Jayce O'Neal

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

Jay-Z

Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.

Alberto Moravia

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

Andre Dubus III

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

Maya Angelou

A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...

C.J. Heck

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

Jeffrey Robinson

Too many irons, not enough fire.

S. Kelley Harrell

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Lorrie Moore

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Will Self

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

Socrates

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

Mary Gaitskill

Never put off writing until you are better at it.

Gary Henderson

When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

Rainbow Rowell

Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.

Hillary Frank

You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

L.M. Montgomery

Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.

Walter Moers

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

Khaled Hosseini

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Alice Walker

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

David Almond

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

Israel Shenker

Writer speaks a stench.

Franz Kafka

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Rebecca Solnit

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Writing Quotes - Page 94

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