Writers Quotes - Page 20

Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work.It’s about the writer you’re becoming while creating.

When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish

Hollywood shines by virtue of light within.

That's not writing that's typing.

Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.

It is so small secret that many writers are also alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, or habitual wearers of blue jeans (in some cases all of the above).

If you are afraid of the critics you will never write a word

I am so over you, Rejection. You can't get to me like that anymore. I won't let you squash my hopes and dreams. (Slams door) So there!

I'm turning into an old man. I own four pairs of oxfords, my stories get a little long winded, and my neighbors play their music too loud.

All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.

A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it’s demons that keep a tortured writer’s spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they’ll give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won’t do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants.

We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.

Saturday night is perfect for writers because other people have "plans.

All writers are insecure, the male ones especially. It's well known. Why else would they spend so much time on make-believe? They're only happy in their imaginary worlds, because that's where they're in charge - where they're God. Did you know that Hemingway's mother dressed him as a girl until he was six years old?"I was not offended by Claudia's glib psychological theory. Like many glib psychological theories, it struck me as fundamentally correct.

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.

It is easy to find the problem. Knowing the difference between critique and criticism is the solution. Condition your rawhide for growth. (Either way).

Honor those who inspire you, who show you the way. The teachers, artists , writers, the healers. Respect their time, their intellectual properties, their fee. They live a life of service, but this is also the way they make their living. This is how they feed, clothe and shelter themselves and their families. This is how they can continue to do their work in the world.

It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes.

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.

Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.

...how many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely...

Creativity is nature. Nature is creativity.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Writer's block: when your imaginary friends stop talking to you.

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.

What they failed to understand was that a creative person can never restrict himself/herself within a particular time-frame. I was no longer a school-going boy. The writer in me revolted – I started to voice my likes and dislikes.

Film gives us a second chance at a first impression.

We were on stage. We were supposed to speak our dialogues. But at times, a smile says more than words ever can!

I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.

My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.

All we have is compassion and stories.

Bravery isn't brandishing a sword. It's standing your moral ground and letting others try their best to take you down.

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

Every day is not a day to master but an adventure to experience.

She gave me hugs that were like oxygen to a dying man and uplifted my soul!

Be daring to push your ideas forward.

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

Until I find a home in a human, art has my heart.

Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience.

Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.

Every book is worth reading. If it cannot make you wiser it will make you a critic

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

A good friend is a healing friend.

We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

I love the smell of coffee when I wake up in the morning. It gives me the awesome feeling of hope!

I waited for the seasons of love to pass from this cold winter to the summer heat I dreamed of.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

I meet people and they become chapters in my stories.

Be brave to share your story! Each of our stories, have a golden treasure for a specific need.

On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.