Writing Quotes - Page 28

It's as hard to get from almost finished to finished as to get from beginning to almost done.

Let your eyes be the camera and your imagination be the set.

Am I still writing? Unthinkable not to. In the very darkest night the words were like shiny pebbles. They caught the light of the moon and stars and reflected it back. One word among them that shone especially brightly. Simplicity. I would approach it, stepping softly, regard it from all sides, finally pick it up, enchanted by it, recognize that its enchantment lay in its shine, its pure meaning. Simplicity. To simply be there. Simply keep going. The longer I kept going, the easier it was to see how beautiful, simply beautiful, it is to be here. I would like to write about how this word shines. I'd like to write about the simplest things.

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?

Don’t wish the world demanded less of you. Rise up and exceed its standards.

Close your eyes. Hear the silent snow. Listen to your soul speak.

It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

One day, I decided I was going to write books forever.

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end." That's how much better it is.

In poetry we pare down our thoughts into their most graceful shapes, like minimalist sculptures.

They were the kind of words you read back and every lettered limb surprises you because you never knew you really felt those things the whole time.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.

It's not a silly pursuit to read beyond what's handed to you, to seek out new voices and leap over the usual books everyone's already talking about and see what you can find on your own.Making definitive choices about what we spend our time on as readers can make a statement, a difference. We can lift other writers up, give space and attention to more voices than the ones that already have all the space and attention.There is power in what we choose to consume as readers, and there is power in what we choose to amplify, celebrate, and share.

It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

You ask me why I write. You might as well ask me why I breathe. I need oxygen to feed my body and ink to feed my soul.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

Like a father with his daughter, the writist plays peek-a-boo with the world. His aim is to evoke that sweet smile, the one that says "i remember you. I am glad you are here again".

When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.

Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own.

God has spoken to me, without words, to my heart. He has told me that I am to rewrite the future and remind His people's faith and to help keep that faith alive attached with the Holy Bible to Him. God gave me the name Compton Gage. My earthly name is not important. My person is not part of the reminder. This is not an ordinary book, this is not a Bible. The materials of the Third Testament, was organized and re-written by me. I was given a good authority by God. BY GOD ONLY!

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Writing is a craft, being an author is work, and having readers and a following is a gift.

Descriptions of dreams have a dubious place in storytelling. For these are dreams which have been imagined--'dreamed up', to be slotted in. A story can be made up. How can a dream be made up? By not rising of its own free will from the unconscious it sets a note of falsity, merely illustrating something 'dream-like', which may be why dream descriptions within stories seen curiously meaningless. To avoid glazing over, best then to turn the page quickly.

Words have weight.

The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

I earn the magic of words by writing.I learn the myth of worlds by imagining.

In the wander land, we engage ourselves in writing.

By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and withoutcharacter and plot, no book can survive.

Content is King. Promotion is Queen

Let the letters clash forming an invisible meaning of a sunny night, freezing chimney, and silent screams. When words betray you, hold on to your imagination.

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.

A young mark twain on the make: "I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp.

Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before.

public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power.

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts.

Membaca dan menulis membuatmu menjadi.

When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.

[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else's houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else's children, they taught. I wouldn't say it's not hard, but why wouldn't it be? All important things are hard.

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.