Writing Quotes - Page 121

...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

God pity the poor novelist.

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...

Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

Writing poetry is a state of free float

The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write book.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

I write romance stories and although I want it to be a beautiful work of art, I am afraid that I will live in the story I created in my mind. It's all in my mind I know, but sometimes, the romance becomes too ideal and realistic for me that I soon fall for the hero that was just a product of my imagination. I think that is both a fearful obstacle and a proof that somehow, you are succeeding to touch a reader's heart - even if it is yours.

To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

Note to myself - It is time for me to start taking my guitar lessons. One of my neighbor's singing and guitar strumming skills are so cool that I can't stop marveling at the music wafting around here.

Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

Laughing in my ear is a muse amused by how I paint her whims on paper with silly words.

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improve

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to

I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

Art does what reality cannot.

Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.

Before we can fix the situation, we have to first see the situation, the world can't see straight right now, some are blinded by hatred, rage, fear, scepticism, some are blinded by their pains.We need to pray...pray that God open our eyes to see the problem from the source and not from the surface.You cannot solve a situation that you cannot see correctly.

...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.

I think maybe today a poem I hopeafter breakfast I start tryingpulling it out of my own gutmostly by force

At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style...but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.

A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.

A true professional not only follows but loves the processes, policies and principles set by his profession.

Writing is not a hobby. Collecting stamps or coins is a hobby. Writing is a calling.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty's name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as longAs there are flowers and you and song.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those who decide to die?

If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.

You can be taught to write – you can’t be taught to be an artist

Are we not all actors playing parts in another person's play?

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet. I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.

You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.

Grab a pen and your turf will have no limits.

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Create from the heart.

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.