Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 3

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.

Writing is magic happening on paper

A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.

Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life.

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

Your dreams don’t stop being dreams because of circumstances.

An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who’s the better writer?

Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!

Your eyes make me pick up my pen and write.

If you surrender to your imagination, the story will write itself.

If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.

Tattoos are a permanent commitment of passion

When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort.

...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror......there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites...

I don’t do math.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.

Sylvia Plath and I met a long time ago. A really long time ago. Was it a summer day? No! It was a wintry November morning!

In retrospect we can only be thankful to all the mistakes that we made and to all the lessons that we learned from them!

You're never as good a writer as you think you are, and you're never as bad. Just keep reading and writing, writing, writing.

Writing is what happens when the words in your head are overpowered by the words in your heart.

The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.

And then it dawned on me that the greatest love stories in the world never have happy endings.

Editing one’s writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.

Writers are like actors too. For every story we create, we must get under the skin of the characters and role play with our writing.

The metaphysical poetry of our innovative life springs from the aesthetic, scenic, and systematic processes of inventiveness, the creative impulse of an active mind generating aesthetical intuition.

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.

We are inspired by divine power to write.

A writer is never alone, he is always with himself

One day I will write a book. An epitaph

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

Show me the contract.

Plot comes from the mind but the characters come from the heart!

Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.

I should be writing ...

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing this trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

Feels so good to be quoted

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.

In order to protect their good names for posterity, many writers never wrote what they thought or the truth as it stood. That's why truth still lies hidden in matters of power, sex and religion. No wonder they chose to do so, many who dared paid with their heads

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

Words are the residue that I was there, that I loved my wife, that I kissed my children goodnight, that I sacrificed my life for them. Words are a curse. Life is a curse. Words escape life. Life escapes words. What in God's name am I? How does someone name a God? What is it to name yourself?

If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble!

Grammar, you're the pickiest noun I know.

A world that does not love, respect and protect its Women is doomed to perish! Because Women are Mother Earth!

I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

Now memories have an unusual way of coming back to you in the middle of a day.

I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful.

Shy people are my favorites. The unmistakable glint of shyness in someone's eyes can mesmerize me for years!