Writers Quotes - Page 2

Whenever I feel sad, I just take out my phone and listen to her laughter recorded in my online messenger.

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")

. If you want to write, just write anything that comes into your mind. You will be surprised at how you can force inspiration to stand on your side.

Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.

Music is a writer's heartbeat.

If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.

To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven.

Like a flower, feel yourself rise above and begin to open.

When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'

You can edit what you write. Why not edit what you say? If it hurts somebody, you can still offer an apology or withdraw your statements

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

A fiery spirit bursts from your soul.

Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

Just Because I Write About Horror, And The Supernatural, Etc...Doesn't Mean I Am A Monster Or A Bad Person.

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.

I'm going to be a person who writes stories.I never told mom and dad how much I loved them.I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.

It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life.

When I told my teachers I wanted to be a writer, alot of them encouraged me to lower my expectations and to be more realistic. So I rode away on my magical, winged horse, spraying faerie dust behind me, and laughing manically as I went.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

My problem as a writer is that—whenever I meet someone for the first time—I immediately invent for them a personality and background that are invariably more interesting than the ones they possess. And confirming this character to be uninteresting after a few minutes of conversation, I decide that they are unnecessary to my story and begin devising ways to kill them off.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.

Writing is exposing yourself to strangers

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

Just being a writer allows one the maturity to have random conversations with random strangers!

Writers are made, they are not born.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.

There's no such thing as 'no market'. Some books are just niche orientated that's all.

Writing is sharing. You share what you have. Great writers have more to share

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man write about a man.

Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.

If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.

You can only write well, what you have experienced.

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling lik

The world is blessed to welcome you.

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

Never stop when you are tired. Stop when you are done!

Always choose love over fear.

When I write I like to give equal justice to lyrics, too. I want the song to have meaning for me so I can make it have meaning for the audience.

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

After writing, there is the letting go part. Perfection is a myth; as we all get better by day.Allow yourself to grow in active practice, release that book to the world, and do better with the next one.

If you see it in Strunk and White it's so.

I'm trying to give my character voice but he won't speak.

As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground.

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

SUCCESS in WRITING occurs when your DREAMS are BIGGER than your EXCUSES.

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad.

When is now.

And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

Do Engineers have stories, Jack?" he asked. "What?" Jack said, without moving."Stories. Myths. Things to keep the boredom out on a long shift.""I think they play cards, mostly," Jack answered. It was a lie, but he told it with surprising deftness; not a waver in his voice or a hesitation in his words. Only the tightening of his shoulders told Ellis he was lying.

Only your children’s grandchildren may remember our stories, but the stories are not what makes a life. It’s living with a smile and a free spirit that will ripple throughout the stars.

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.