Writers Quotes - Page 7

That which is cool is driven by the soul.

The heart of a story gives it life.

Every wound is a word.

Have you noticed how prejudice still exists today? For instance, now they challenge famous people for their past achievements: People like Christopher Columbus and now even Vince Lombardi. Nothing surprises me. I never grew-up with prejudices against anyone. I don't care what color you are or where you came from. This sort of stuff to me never made sense. You see I grew up in an "educated family." Education teaches you not to be so ignorant.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

Writers don’t get time off. Every moment - waking or sleeping - a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.

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

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

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!

Not all writers are silently suffering inside. But it certainly helps.

Soup is cozy.

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

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

Dreams, kindled in the fire of imagination,ignite in the brilliance of our minds,and are wrought in the work of our hands" -

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

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

...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only when you begin to look inward that you can begin to have an effect on those out there, the ones with the greedy eyes and outstretched hands.

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

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

i didn't call myself a writer until everyone else did. i knew it was real then.

I write amongst the stars, and the canvased paper moon. I paint the fields of green, sprinkling morning dew. I teach the birds to sing, a tweet, a tweet, times two. And when my busy day is done, I dream sweet dreams of you.

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

Stories change the world.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Falling in love with a writer is a dangerous thing, isn't it? The only thing you get out of it sometimes is immortality.

You can have practically anything you want in this world, if you have great credit.

Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.

Love is alive when there's music in your heart.

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

A woman does not become whole, until she has a baby.

Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.

Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense but that ability is at the bottom of writing I am sure.

Give all of life’s oxygen to the fire that is your soul.

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.

I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each lettter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won’t throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that familiar form….. carries too much meaning for my capricious heart.

When the vision fill yours mind and passio hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled.

What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

Writers live in the world to write the sacred words.

You have seven writers in your basement?”Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.

When authors write from personal experiences,straight from the heart,it touches the readers. Their work speaks out to all who read it,and most of the time,people can relate to what was written. I have always believed that books can change people's lives. Especially ones where the author is sincere,and writes deep,thoughtful,touching things from their hearts."-Nina Jean Slack

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

A story is a part of the writer's soul, told to the world.

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

In love there is truth, and in truth there is peace.

my strength should not threaten you.my strength is not a threat to your strength.you are strong.you are beautiful.you are lush.you are powerful.as you are.as i am.imagine the force we would be togetherif we lifted each other up.imagine the force we would be togetherif we didn't tear each other down.

Art is everywhere.