Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 6

A tweet a day keeps writer's block away.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

Words raced thru his mind and his fingers ached to capture them all on paper.

I heard the breeze whisper your name to the trees. And the flowers giggled smiling at the leaves. I and my loneliness keep talking about you.

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.

An invisible, yet active current of mental energy, underscores any book as well as any other form of artistic creation. A creative burst of psychological energy ignites any creative project. The emotional energy that underlies the artistic work propels it forward endowing it with articulation, texture, rhythm, and movement. When the expressive energy of the artist flags, the work comes to a stopping point and it takes on its final composition.

I'm a writer. I'm a Christian. I like sex. But I haven't had it. I believe in waiting until marriage. But that doesn't mean I want my characters to.

If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.

We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers

I consider whoever my words land on to be my target, that’s why I like flash fiction, it’s a lot like using a shotgun.

Looking at old photographs inundates you with a flood of nostalgic emotions! And you can't be sure where you want to swim in the deluge of memories!

Writin’ Is Fightin'!

Whatever you do, let it be lovely.

A Writer Must Have Text Appeal

I am as disillusioned with the number of likes for one's posts on social networking sites as I am with the number of followers in one's social network. A great number of people liking your work does not prove your mettle as a writer or as an artiste!If my work can affect even one person and make him/her think then I am satisfied as a writer.

We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!

Climax: It's all downhill from here.

The writer who position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society.

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

If you don’t write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.

. . . any one episode, or even moment, in a person’s life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we’ve found of approaching that kind of complexity.

I don’t think there’s a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And that’s what the best writing does, that’s what art does. It looks a reader in the eye, and it proceeds honestly with that reader, and nakedly. There is a compact there, a bond, a relationship, a union, a symbiosis . . . It’s not about you. Whether you’re a genius or an idiot savant. It’s about the work. The work is more important than you. So it’s not about back-claps and plaudits and “isn’t that author smart.” It’s about, “this book really connected with me. And even though you, my friend, are very different from me, I’m lending it to you, because I think it will connect with you as well.” Community. Across the eras. Between people who have never met, who will never meet, who are nonetheless bound in something together, in different ways.

You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

Women’s fiction” doesn’t sound like anything but a slur to my ears.

Destroying the planet is like stepping from a moving train and thinking it will all work out.

Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.

A writer or an author must always be the no.1 fan of his/her book.

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.

I don't spend money on books. I write them myself.

Become my muse. And let me paint you with my words...

I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen.

Talented writers etched the story detailing the travails of broken souls numerous times. The poets recounted an equal amount of times the lucent tears of human laughter and weeping sorrow. Everyone understands bitterness and joy. Conversely, the most evocative aspects of human beings, the bewildering clarification of their ambiguous natures, are virtually indefinable and therefore unutterable. Written testaments to love, truth, beauty, and adoration of nature are inherently weak because words fail to convey what a person experiences inside the spaces that compose their chemical field.

A writer of any merit does not worry about being accepted everywhere. He must write to inspire, to change for the better or to challenge the status quo!

People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.

I have voices in my headI'm a slave to imaginary peopleI feel what they feelI experience what they experience I live in their world And I'm devoted to translating their storiesI'm not crazy, I'm a writer

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.

Flora was in that state where the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and wishes to go on holiday - and where the flesh in most cases wins hands down with a packed suitcase. It did so now. So she did what many a researcher both great and insignificant does when they are stuck. She yawned while contemplating how to catch the Muse by surprising Her. Almost invariably, the Muse has seen it all before - and also yawns.

As a writer, you don't just write for the ears, you also write for the eyes.

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

Breaking through writer's block is like thinking out of the box: Both require an ability to imagine a world outside your four walls or rearranging them to get a better view.

...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.

A writer’s tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection.

If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure since it does not live up to its claims.

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

Writing is a little bit like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Then you do it for money.

Writing is all about self-expression, we want to speak up, to get it off our chest. Whether we make an impact or not that is not for us to decide

Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

A cliffhanger is when ...

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.

There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.

One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to live a footprint in the sands of history when giants are passing through the same sands unless you are one of the giants

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.