Writing Quotes - Page 111

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

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

There is no where that life problem can take you that God's presence cannot reach you. There is nothing that people can do to you that can keep God from getting to you.

A book is kind of like a good Horcrux, if we can imagine that -- a piece of the writer's soul, preserved in a physical object for all time, and changing the lives of all those who come in contact with it.

I'll only tell you what matters. And, the truth is, everything matters.

My godfather sad that story was abut taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements of us.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.

Writing has the power of permanence.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

It’s incredible how small the English language gets when you’re trying to make it fix something.

All that sweetness makes me feel weird. My sister was never the loving type.

Be daring to push your ideas forward.

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.

I don’t experience writer’s block, I only have periods of severe writer’s diarrhoea; an incoherent mess of unfitting words placed in random sentences. Luckily, I can usually separate the shit from “the shit” later on.

I need you because I know I deserve you but let me fall in love with you one last time before I let go. So I can remember the beautiful imperfection that rattled my bones.

Purity. Serenity... Solitude: What you ought to uphold. But the important thing is whether you believe it.

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

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

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

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.

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

A single poem, alonecan turn tidesscatter galaxiesand burst forth with riversfrom paradise.

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

Don't resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.

Even so have I given the womb of the earth to those that be sown in it in their times.

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.

Show me your shoes, and I shall show you what paths you have yet to walk.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

I'm the G when you spell OG

I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice through your veins and becomes difficult and visual perception takes on the appearance of cinematographer on Cops, with unsteady frames and jostling scenes, running through a backyard chasing perpetrators.

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

Writing is the only way to run away from home, without ever leaving.

If I should be available to everyone, I will eventually end up with nothing to give to anyone. So the greatest gift you can receive from me is my time. Count yourself lucky if I give you a minute of my hour.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost all of us will produce a lot of really lousy stories before we start to get good. (Not all of us will choose to publish those lousy stories, but that's a whole separate discussion...)

I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.

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.

I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point.

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.

I’m sorry if...I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.

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.

And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!

. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

I wish to keep writing.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,But came the waves and washèd it away:Again I wrote it with a second hand,But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Writing is Like waking on Water, Seems not possible at all, But Only person Understand Who Feel the Walking Sound of Tears while felling from Eyes

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.