Writing Quotes - Page 102

How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

God made my enemies to serve me in my absence. God made the things that conspired to destroy me feed me into the place that He was preparing for me. I am a big girl and I can handle trouble and my enemies.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r

Hold on to your heart and life will give you wings.

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.

Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.

Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

People who understand everything get no stories.

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.

A poetess is not as selfishas you assume.After months of agonising over her marriage of words—the bride—and spaces—the groom,she knows that as soonas she has penned the poem,it’s yours to consume.So, without giving it a think,she blows on the inkand the letters fly awaylike dandelions on a windy day,landing on hands and lips, on hearts and hips.But more often than not,you can easily spotthem trodden and forgotten,becoming sodden and rotten.Yet, she will continue to makewhat’s others to takebecause selfishness is not the mark of a poetess.

You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early... Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!

Writing is transcendental. It is a form of expression, a form of art that you can take anywhere. That you can do anywhere. It poses the deepest questions in the universe. It generates emotion. It elicits empathy, promotes learning, creates an intellect you simply cannot get from any other medium. For me, it is air.

Lost in a book is a great place to be found.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

Evil is real but God is greater.

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

I wrote because of their inability to nurture me. I wrote to conceal the truth that life was filled with pain and that true beauty could only come from that pain. I wrote to simply disguise that pain.

Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.

Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is when it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them...engendering this reality is the impression of writing as a simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann's observation that, 'a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others

A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”And I say to them, “Fuck you!” One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.

If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.

Upon reading, great stories by Great Spirits, the glorious inspiration penetrated our soul; we can’t help but to shed tears. It was a soul soothing and a deep spiritual awaken.

Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author’s personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences.

A stream of thoughts flows through one’s mind at a sacred-time.

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

Imagination is glow of thoughts by supernatural force.

A love of writing is far greater than any word count.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again...

A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget.

To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to

She was the reason I started to write but her beauty is kept me writing.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.

Like madness is the glory of this life.

I have found a higher calling; inspirational-writing!I can’t imagine myself doing any other work, when I ought to write and transmit, awe-inspiring-words, to the souls longing for it.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

Your greatest dreams will always slumber within the vicious depths of fear.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

Is the healing process the writing or the reading of that writing?What are we all healing from? Ourselves?What are we all healing towards? Ourselves?

It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters “Your number-one fan.” The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Religiousity is unself glory not purity

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.