Writing Quotes - Page 25

What writing means to me?-Releasing my wolves...(Natasa Alina Culea)

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform what happens to us in our own experience. It is a way to move from passive to active. We may still be the victims of circumstance, but by our understanding those circumstances we place events within the ongoing context of our own life, that is, the life we "own".

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

A person whom writes begins by putting down what they know about loneliness, shame, love, and heartache. In writing fully, they discover many other aspects of themselves that they never suspected including doubts, beliefs, ironies, and farcicalities.

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.

There comes a time in a man's life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. 'All the perfumes of Arabia' makes you think of all the perfumes of Arabia and nothing more. It is the trouble with all metaphors where human behavior is concerned. People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments or anything else but people. Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.)

The harder you search the more troubled you become.

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.

Rituals help us change modes.

Writing is magic happening on paper

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.

A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

My books are mine, and yet they are alien to me--as a child belongs to a parent and yet has a life of its own. I can guide and hope and nudge my characters this and that way, but in the end, they become what they become. I don't always like what they become myself, but like a parent, there are times when I just don't know what to do about it. Other times when I'm so proud of them I could bust.

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.

As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Thought flies and words go on foot.

When we’ve decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.

Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

Remember yourself. Deep inside, you have an observer, a constant neutral witness to your posture, gesture, facial expression, breathing, taste, impressions of light and sound. Don't leap to interpret. Just be there and observe.

We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.

Artists, especially writers, great writers, are the most honest people I know. There are deep confessions in their words. And if we're strong enough to expose the spaces between them, we find truths there also.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

To be able to influence Tanzanian literature and African literature, and sell our books in Tanzania as well as in our continent, we need to be committed to what we do. And what we do is writing. Write as much as you can. Read as much as you can. Use the library and the internet carefully for research and talk to people, about things that matter. To make a living from writing, and make people read again in Tanzania and Africa; we must write very well, very good stories.

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

It's impossible to be a good writer if you haven't lived badly. A past life of drinking heavily, fighting and whoring all help to ease those words onto the page.

Writing fluency sometimes needs an intense agony somewhere in your mind

Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Words are drops of blood, from my heart.

For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

Thy heart had gone too far in this world, and think thou to comprehend the way of the most High?

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

Lineation can make your break your poems.

Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza.

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?

Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter.

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.

Rich can live better than poor but they cannot live without poor.

The mysteries of life enfold with time.

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.