Writing Quotes - Page 14

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

Never ever forget that you enlisted in the ranks – you weren’t press ganged or drafted. Nobody owes you anything – least of all respect for your work – until you’ve earned it with what you put on the page.

For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light.

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

Every child must be taught how to think, read and write.

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

If you cannot live with hope and create with intention or be kind to a stranger, bury your head. You are not living at all.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Magic is when you live your life the way you didn’t picture it and leave nothing behind.

Winter teetered on the verge of succumbing to the returning sun, but today the breeze still preferred the touch of snowflakes

I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

Characters are the lifeblood of anygood book.

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.

...it has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?", December 31, 1989)]

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.

Write to your fear.

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless medio

People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit.

It's okay, Ms Rainn, you were simply lost in your imagination.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself

Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

In flight from intellectual heaviness, [he] arrives at intelligent weightlessness. Every notion is flipped this way and that; the answer to every question is yes and no; the proliferating examples from all the arts...overwhelm the observations that they are designed to illustrate; the general impression in one of uncontrollable articulateness. [He] does not think his thoughts; he convenes them. There is not a sign of struggle anywhere.

If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.

But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.

Some days I wonder if I stopped writing about him, if I’d love him a little less.

Behind every drama is a good story...behind every tear is the person who wrote it.

have written my first grateful thanks for a fresh new day in a new year.

Writing is just building a new world – one character, one place, one maniac at a time.

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician.

Words disappear in the air, but writing remains. If you want something to be remembered about you, write it down

Rules for navigating the net, Or people will roll their eye Lest you can't roll the R rect: Literally, don´t dink and dive!

You'll never be as good as the next page you write, or as bad as the last one.