Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 9

But what is life without a passion?

You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise

Identifying as a writer is a matter of self-acceptance. It's not a thing that can be given to you, or bestowed upon you. You are a writer if you write. That's it. If what you are seeking is to be acknowledged as a writer by other people, many of them strangers, you're in for a demoralizing journey. It is a silly club where those who have been 'accepted' are loathe to permit others into. It's sort of like how we Americans love denying our own immigrant origins while railing against immigration.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates.

I have come to learn, that when people of money and power organize to set upon to break a person they seek to silence, and the person seems but a shadow of what they were, under the endless barrage, in the end when laid to rest, the dignity, compassion and presence of the person somehow endures, and their words awaken to speak clearer than before.As if torches ignite, when their flame is gone,and the light of their truth,Is brilliantly lit and once more born.

Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children—you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it.

Writing heals my heart like no pill ever could.

Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

Your eyes hold all the answers to my life's problems.

I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.

I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.

I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

The characters act for reasons that they can’t control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it’s all just puppetry on the part of the writer.

Writing is self-pleasure

A good writer should be able to communicate to the reader, 'I know your life. I know what you have truly experienced. It’s not right or wrong. It’s survival. It’s making mistakes, and trying to redeem yourself. It’s imperfections, and trying to make yourself better. It’s outrages, and crimes, and insults, which often are not righted, which you have to fix yourself, in your own mind, in your own heart, so that you are not poisoned'.

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

The power of the writer is to capture the thoughts live and present them as they appeared in his mind

Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.

Why do I do it to myself? Why don't I get an ordinary job?

...I’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.

Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.

Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don’t let stress steal your joy.

Each of us is the enactor of our personal saga; we create the phantom of the self. We are the principal character in our personal story, as well as witnesses and reactors to the storylines of other persons whom we adore. We are each the composers of our evolving personal story; we are the protagonist of our personal life story.

There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.

One day someone will fall in love with you despite all your flaws! Then magic will happen in your life!

That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

Rarely will I write indoors, even if it means getting wet during rain, or my hands numb in winter.

The blank page, otherwise known as the vast playground of the writer's imagination.

The way my mind flows is conducive to self-learning. I do better obsessively studying various writers and writing techniques and writing theories on my own than I would do if I were in a classroom and the professor was telling me (and 20 other students at the same time) to study these same things. Even if the professor told us to study the exact things I would otherwise be studying on my own, I would have a much harder time applying myself and focusing and taking anything the professor assigned seriously. That’s just the way my mind works–my fear of groupthink, my desire toward (passion for, obsession with) uniqueness and originality and the creation of new things. By studying things on my own, I might arrive at the exact same place others arrive at as they study amongst their peers–but to my mind, this would be okay. I at least would have arrived there (at those thoughts, at those techniques, at those ideas and approaches and whatever-else-have-you) on my own. And that’s just me.

I have never known anything to be as exquisite or as excruciating as the Love-Hate relationship I have with writing.

If you don’t do anything to capture and draw your memories—no matter whether you choose words, pencil, photography, or filming—the only place where they have a chance to exist is in your head, which can’t be called the most reliable place to store them; soon, they’d be lost forever… leaving no trace, like they never existed… like YOU never existed… same as those billions and billions of lives that had already disappeared from the world.

A poet’s words are like mortar to the bricks of society.

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

The writing in itself is transformative for me.

It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.

I don't care about wearing branded clothes or flaunting brands. But I do care about the books that I read and the music that I listen to.

I don’t mind writing philosophical thoughts. If I don’t want to die like one.

This is a forum for readers. Authors walk these halls at their own risk. I’ve been to the Coliseum in Rome. GR is just that. Books are gladiators. Readers are ravenous citizens awaiting their next bite of entertainment, all Caesars with thumbs readied for judgement. Even champions fall prey to sword now and then. And you know what they say about the pen and the sword…the analogy is a bit muddled, but it’s in there somewhere.

I and my silences keep talking to each other.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.

I hope that someday when I am gone, someone, somewhere, picks my soul up off of these pages and thinks, "I would have loved her.

Writing is a way of life.

When the vision fills your brain and passion hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled. (Marti Melville)

And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by.

Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little but yield to the tug of imagination. Ordinary people may practice for years to 'perfect' the challenge of writing; but the one destined to create and destroy with the stroke of a pen, the strike of the key, their wells of imagination shall never run dry.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

To sit down so often with nothing to say,-to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance or having said,-is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everyone has it.