Writing Quotes - Page 116

An Authorpreneur focuses on establishing one's brand to the consumer using different avenues to promote their work.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.

Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms but in the imaginative use of them.

I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.

Do little things every day that no one else seems to want to do, be patient, and success will find you.

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by. Arising unchained.No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation. Arising honestly. The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away. Pen in hand...Arising to write the next chapter.(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey)

The simple everyday experiences become the doorway to new thoughts and inspirations.

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.

To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Warning...well-loved stories are habit forming...

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the work­shop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Per­haps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons.

I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)

I'm more interested in becoming a commercial writer, and unfortunately, commentary on my writing from a bunch of other unpublished writers is of little utility in that regard. Being a better writer is something of a moot point, since if you're not a commercial writer to some extent, very few people will know whether your writing is any good or not.

Written words can also sing.

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection which hurt us. Comedy is power.

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

Today I am amused, and I haven't seen anyone yet.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

Sometimes, we think faster than what you write.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

Sometimes words I think are small come out big.

A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

God always wants us to see things from heaven's prospective. You may not be doing much to your community but what you are is so important. You are significant.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

Writer's block is when your imaginary friends won't talk to you.

Every book I've read appears in my writing.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Our readers are curious, creative, and compassionate fairy punks who are citizens of the world.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

Just knowing that you are there and you would be thinking about me while I am thinking about you makes my heart feel serene and contented.

...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")