Writing Quotes - Page 17

the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born - without the luxury of time.

Cuz even a gangsta rapper can find redemptionFor the sins committed before revelation.

I believe in magic. Writing is my magic wand, and through my magic I create my own secret world, away from all these worries and responsibilities. Love, honesty and humanity is essential to enter this beautiful world of magic. I dwell among White magical peacocks, glowing unicorns, fire breathing turquoise dragons, talking trees, flying horses, talking wise jackals and wolves, crystal water falls, secret pathways hidden in urban gardens and books with doorways to secret worlds. You need to believe in magic to experience it.

Just because you're breathing, doesn't mean you're alive.

By all means, tell the cops about the crazy robot lady with the black leather body suit and the Kill Bill sword. Hope you like straitjackets.

A writer always writes.

Resolution demands a sacrifice.

Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.

In this world there are two types of people: the ones who hurt, and the ones who are hurt. But if we all claim to be the victims, then aren't we all the criminals too?

It’s when your plans look dead that God’s resurrection power begins to operate in your life in greater measure

Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

The world would have been a better place if some men had just shut their mouths.

To be inspired is great, but to inspire is an honor.

Since I am never alone with myself. Since I am always watching the character playing my part in the scene, there is no possibility of spontaneity.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

This poem was meant to be unwritten. But I am writing it now and have thereby changed destiny.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow significant. But really, it’s not their personal lives that matter, but their own, hard-fought-for ideas. Not just anybody’s ideas, but the ideas that they have paid for with their suffering and their sacrifices and their love of their fellow humans.

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

If therefore that which is sown be not turned upside down, and if the place where the evil is sown passes not away, then cannot it come that is sown with good?

The truth is there isn’t anything to me at all. All I know is that I can’t sleep well, I can’t dream well and I’m quite in love with you. That’s all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it’s not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That’s when I realise you’re dead. That’s when I remember you’ve been gone for years. That’s when I remember I’m awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

I am a lifelong lover of form–content interplay, and this book is no exception. As with several of my previous books, I have had the chance to typeset it down to the finest level of detail, and my quest for visual elegance on each page has had countless repercussions on how I phrase my ideas. To some this may sound like the tail wagging the dog, but I think that attention to form improves anyone’s writing. I hope that reading this book not only is stimulating intellectually but also is a pleasant visual experience.

There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

I think today is a day for the heart. What do you think?

Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three....

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Artistry is the dance of color & form, whether visual, musical, or sparked in the imagination by the written word.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

I got it! I got it!” Heeb declared triumphantly. Evan stopped in the middle of his kitchenette to hear Heeb’s idea. “Sex in the Title.”“Yeah, that’s what you’ve been saying I need.”“No, that’s the title: ‘Sex in the Title.’”“You want me to call my novel ‘Sex in the Title?’”“Yeah. Isn’t it great?

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.

Write like it matters, and it will.

The best lie is the one that has an element of truth, so it’s good to include something real in your fiction.

I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun?I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without.I want to be someone you can’t live without.

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

after life has broken you open, perhaps you may create art

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities?

Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.

People represented in book or film travel vast oceans of life unrecorded; studeo time costs money, and pens grow heavy.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

Submitted for your approval--the curious case of Colleen O’Brien and thegorgeous time traveling Scot who landed in her living room.” – Rod Serling

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in Eng

I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.