Writing Quotes - Page 23

I beseech thee, O Lord, let me have understanding: For it was not my mind to be curious of the high things, but of such as pass by us daily.

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever solved a problem while believing it was hopeless. It might put the aims and the solution unrealistically high – in the same way that folktales tend to be about kings and queens – but this is because it is better to aim for the moon and get halfway there than just to aim for the roof and get halfway upstairs.

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

There is no reticence nor any limit to a 'Majique.' Only the unwillingness of the mind to open itself to the limitless power of possibilities that exist within the unbelievable.

Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a secondperhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

... but I could also write about love. How a hand can silence thousands of voices and how someone’s smell can make you feel at home even though you’re a million miles away fromhomeand have you ever hurt someone you love? Because you’re angry. Because you’re disappointed and sad and you just really wanted to love and be loved in returnbut life got in the way and you both said things that should never be said and you’re angry but don’t know how to. Because you still feel this strange love for him, but you’re also fucking angry and you want to hit him, but then hug him because hurting him is hurting yourself, and then hit him again because you’re angry! and so you fall on your knees because you’re hopeless to yourself and your own emotionsand that’s love, my friend.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about his metaphor is that is makes writing much more than a lifesaving venture.

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.

Your book goes places you may never go and helps people you may never meet

The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop.

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

… this is my first language.” {on Writing}

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.

I don’t need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, “Let’s have lunch.

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

Yet should there hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,Which into words no virtue can digest.

Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

Every great writer is a great reader.

Ponder now by thyself, how great fruit of wickedness the grain of evil seed had brought forth. And when the ears shall be cut down, which are without number, how great a floor shall they fill?

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

She needed the chaos within her in order to discover the extraordinary no man could ever reach.

Writing isn't about creating perfect characters. There's no such thing. It's about creating characters that are real; flawed-- yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn't make them weak; if they believed all they needed was them self, they would be. A strong heroine isn't afraid to admit that a best friend, or soul mate, is exactly what they need at one moment or another. A strong heroine never stands alone. They stand tall; they believe in who they are. They are perfect in every human flaw, because as humans we are flawed. And in every flaw, I see the perfection of their souls. Writers breath life into simple words and create beings--flaws and all.

I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.

To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that's not true. I write for me. I publish for money.

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term “fire” exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of “seditious roots” that could “dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.

I would not be myself without writing.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

When I finally find that one willing agent, I'll have found my prize in the Cracker Jack box.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

Books measure time in both moments and years. We all grow old but the stories never will.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

Make it so good and so clear that it doesn't need any further explanation.

The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand.

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.

Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.