Writing Quotes - Page 16

I don't trust men everybody likes. Being nice isn't the same as being good.

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make

Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ...

The only way to survive after death is by breathing life into the universe before death.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.

Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.

Honesty is easier when you have no face and no real name. And honesty, for me, is very easy on paper.

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)

Don't mention your move before you make a move.

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

All the failures in my life freed me from all my fears so that I can succeed.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

Three years later and I’m still writing about you. I don’t know if that says more about you or I.

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

Passion is a deep love for sacred activity.

It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.

Death is the easy part, the hard part is living and knowing you could be so much more then you’re willing to be.

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry‘til not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper“Read…

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

We know that those things to which we have an emotional connection stick with us better than those for which we have none. Dramatization is a way to get your intellectual ideas across to your audience emotionally.

To describe an emotion is to feel with words. To communicate a moment of existence is to bridge the eternal and the temporal with an intellectual engagement of body, soul, spirit, and mind. To write, therefore is to entangle the mysteries of the universe in a collection of words, a web of ideas, a single drop of ink on a page.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.

When my journal appears many statues must come down.

Her maktul katilinde yaşamaya devam eder.

Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

About writing:The trick is to make sure you love what you've produced--to Believe..in order to convince.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden....

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our ætheric bodies.

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Creativity and intelligence, rather than violence, are the best problem solvers.

He could tell her that dogs used to look like cats and vice versa without a lick of proof and it would change the way she regarded the animals.

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue.

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures.He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's.He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to.He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

The advice to "kill your darlings" has been attributed to various authors across the various galaxies... and Mister Heist hated them all.Why teach young writers to edit out whatever it is they feel most passionate about?Better to kill everything in their writing they DON'T love as much.Until only the darlings remain.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.", O Magazine, November 2009]

I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.

I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely think it's about the money. It's a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor.

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doin

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.

I don’t want to be remembered for my work. I want to be remembered for my love.