Writing Quotes - Page 97

Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Ernest Hemingway

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

Y.S. Lee

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.")

Neil Gaiman

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

H.P. Lovecraft

If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

Anne Lamott

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

Jincy Willett

This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination.I send you...A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you've ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to car, sitting or lying down on velvet lounge chairs, listening and asking questions. There is also a voluminous library on the train, with every book you've ever wanted to read or look at. Kind people bring you delicious tidbits to eat and nourishing liquids to drink. If you take a nap, time stands still until you return so you never miss anything. You receive a large journal filled with photographs, drawings and descriptions of your journey to take with you when you leave. You realize that you can board this train at any time.

S.A.R.K.

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.

Grace Paley

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.

Junot Díaz

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again...

Hunter S. Thompson

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

Anaïs Nin

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

Neil Gaiman

Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.

Lemony Snicket

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Francois Rene De Chateaubriand

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command....I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of teh work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

Madeleine L'Engle

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

Jorge Luis Borges

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

Joanna Russ

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

Dashiell Hammett

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

Gustave Flaubert

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

H.L. Mencken

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

Jacques Barzun

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Joyce Carol Oates

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.

Neil Gaiman

You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?" I said. To myself.

Jennifer Donnelly

Margaret: Can I - can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President's name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President's name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else?Margaret: Yeah! Or... do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?Leo: I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'etat!Margaret: Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that.Leo: I would think. And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?Margaret: It was just for fun.

Aaron Sorkin

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Thomas Pynchon

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

Barack Obama

Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman.

Frank Miller

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

Terry Pratchett

not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.

Thomas Jefferson

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]

John Osborne

Menulis kembali kenangan masa lalu butuh sebuah keberanian.

Iwan Setyawan

You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.

Dave Eggers

Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there.

Jef Mallett

I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.

Besa Kosova

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.

Haruki Murakami

Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.

Drew Goodman

Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.

J.R. Ward

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Anne Lamott

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Umberto Eco

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Umberto Eco

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

David Foster Wallace

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

Jennifer Donnelly

Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it -- if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure.

Warren Ellis

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

Jack Kerouac

it's good for you to write down your thoughts. It'stherapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think aboutlife.

Katie Kacvinsky

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

Sandra Brown

Menjadi penulis adalah sebuah perjalanan panjang, yang tidak selalu diisi oleh hal-hal yang menyenangkan. Akan selalu ada kritik, akan selalu ada komentar negatif, akan selalu ada kesalahan. Yang terpenting adalah kita belajar dari kesalahan-kesalahan tersebut dan bangkit untuk menggapai mimpi kita.

Winna Efendi

Never start with a clear idea of storyline. Instead, commence blindly, with a vague notion of trying to include a reference to your favourite band, gift shop, or chocolate bar.

Alan C. Martin

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

Nadine Gordimer

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

George Saunders

Iniisip ni Lucas kung gaano kalaki ang kapangyarihan ng isang writer. Sa pamamagitan ng mga salita ay kaya niyang patigilin ang dyip, ilabas ang lihim ng mga pasahero, pabuhusin ang ulan upang linisin ang mga basura sa palibot, ikulong ang mga opisyal na corrupt at tuluyang i-delete sa bansa ang kahirapan.

Ricky Lee

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Archibald MacLeish

...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.

Jennifer Donnelly

...(W)here there's drama, there's crap.

Jincy Willett

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

Connie Willis

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Writing Quotes - Page 97

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