Writing Quotes - Page 18

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the'.

Write about fear. Write about pain. Write about heartache and resentment. Nothing worth reading comes from writing what can be said out loud.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Funny how I keep forgetting you’re insane.” - Colleen O’Brien

So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all.

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.

It is strange to hear my wordsRead back to me.I don't think I wrote themTo have them ever leave the page.I think I only writeWhat happens across my brainWhen my feet are too weary To dance anymore.

In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and inconsequential, he does not attempt to pass over them in silence; his example could be followed by solemn historians who recount actions so briefly and succinctly that we can barely taste them, and leave behind in the inkwell, through carelessness, malice, or ignorance, the most substantive part of the work.

There is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, 'See, this is new?' it had been already of old time, which was before us.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

When you put yourself on the page, but it will never be good enough for anyone else, when your raw, bloody heart's smashed into letters and words and paragraphs--can't they see the gore still dripping? What more do they want?-- and none of it matters?

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.

If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.

So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I've already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it's God will.

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.

I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

Acceptance and validation are the fuels of the future.

If you'd blush saying something in person, don't write it.

Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act, anything -- we need only listen.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

Writing fiction is one of the greatest forms of empathy. It's not enough to simply write from the perspective of your characters...you have to feel what they feel.

And as their penile pain began to subside, the two men were able to form more complex thoughts, resulting in a collaborative work: the development of a worldview that might be described as “penilosophy.

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.

What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

We are the thoughts we choose to keep.

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance.

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past ("en me retraçant ces détails, j'en suis à me demander s'ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés"). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

Life has no happy endings, actually, no endings at all, just an ongoing series of beginnings. A story—whether it’s happy or sad, whether it makes sense or not, what its meaning is—depends entirely on where you start it and where you end it.

Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed – and it was very eager to make your acquaintance.

(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.

Don't imitate. Find your own writing voice and hone it until it is yours alone.

For a different woman, a different relationship, a different situation, gentleness might have been the proper, the only approach—but not for this woman, in these circumstances. The only thing that will cleanse Claire (and reassure her: look at what she says at the end of it. She feels safe again, having felt the power and violence in him) is violence. And—the most important point here—Jamie pays attention to what she wants, rather than proceeding with his own notion of how it should be, even though it’s a sensible notion and the one most people would have.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

When I hang upside down and write the wrong way up, will my letters be upside down or the right way up?

She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

Turning things over and over in isolation had led me to a certain point, but I knew that to get any further I'd have to voice some ideas aloud, just to see how they sounded. But I certainly didn't go to Ellie expecting any kind of constructive input on her part. It was more that I'd hit a wall and needed someone to talk around the subject with - like when you come up against a problem that's just immune to normal logic.

In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.

I fight evil, and words are my weapons of choice.