Writing Quotes - Page 22

Language is the gateway of the mind and a bridge that connects us to other human beings. Language enables a person to share their clandestine inner world with other human beings and to learn about other people’s mysterious world of logical thoughts and poetic sentiments.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of.

Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.

It is not in the gene of an Intellectually blinded person to experience the paradise in the writer's imagination.

... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?Now, write that book.

Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.

Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.

Dreams. They start in your beautiful mind. Think of beautiful things and it will manifest into actions because your body will listen to you. Like it always does.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

You cannot prove your worth by bylines and busyness.

Stories matter. They shape our lives, expectations, and dreams. They are the warp and weave of our human existence, binding us into a fabric far stronger than any individual element

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Somebody is observing my writings, I know that.That's one reason why I keep reading and writing.

Power does not pardon, power punishes.

The chaos in me is the chaos in you. Like the love in you is the love in me. So maybe we’re both a little crazy. Enough to believe we’re found where dreams are born and beneath our faults remain a science, where you and I will run away and leave nothing behind.

Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist’s case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person’s life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously.

The stories I read gives strength to my spirit.

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

Sometimes to self-discover you must self-destruct.

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.

Never fails. Every new book I write seems impossible, writes like I'm typing from dictation, edits like I didn't write it, and finishes like I couldn't possibly have written it.

Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences

You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead.As a vocation, it involves the laying on of hands. You receive your vocation and in your turn you must pass it on. Perhaps you will do this only through your work, perhaps in other ways. Either way, you're part of a community, the community of writers, the community of storytellers that stretches back through time to the beginning of human society.As for the particular society to which you yourself belong -- sometimes you'll feel you're speaking for it, sometimes -- when it's taken an unjust form -- against it, or for that other community, the community of the oppressed, the exploited, the voiceless. Either way, the pressures on you will be intense; in other countries, perhaps fatal. But even here, speak 'for women,' or for any other group that is feeling the boot, and there will be many at hand, both for and against, to tell you to shut up, or to say what they want you to say, or to say it a different way. Or to save them. The billboard awaits you, but if you succumb to its temptations you'll end up two-dimensional."Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

Whatever your dreams may be, never dismiss them as impossible. Always hope. Always try. You just never know when things will happen.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

Believe in yourself and in your own voice, because there will be times in this business when you will be the only one who does. Take heart from the knowledge that an author with a strong voice will often have trouble at the start of his or her career because strong,distinctive voices sometimes make editors nervous. But in the end, only the strong survive.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

For some, like me, writing comes at a price. My best creations were written while I was emotionally ripped open. I've spent some scenes so mentally self-exposed that I could barely see what I was writing. And as I sit here-my heart pounding, heaviness threatening to pull my heart down to my stomach, I ask myself this question...are you ready to bleed some more? I smile and without pause, I pull up my current WIP.

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Originality also brings on the most merciless attacks. The world resents originality in the beginning writer, and then rewards it abundantly once that writer has been successfully published. Cherish your own voice. Don't try to sound like anybody else. Sound like yourself and take the slings and arrows and keep going.

In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art.

Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn't write!

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he ‘took on,’ and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term ‘Orwellian’ in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as ‘Orwellian’ is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as ‘Orwellian’ is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime.

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can’t walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It’s what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOKTranslation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day.

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.

She had words in her heart which she released thru her fingertips.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Listen. You will still only love me. And I will only love you. It’s only that we’ll have different names. Sometimes I’ll be Augusta, queen of Gondal, and you’ll be a dangerous highwayman. Sometimes we’ll be Alexander and Zenobia, the young lovers. Sometimes… sometimes we will just be two lonely children roaming the moors together. But the ‘he’ of the story will always be you, and the 'she’ of the story will always be me. Forever.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

If you aren't polite when giving criticism you will come off as an awful person and if you aren't polite when receiving criticism you will come off as an awful person.

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?