Writing Quotes - Page 30

They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find.

A writer should feel deeply from his heart of the joys and sorrows of people. And he must write as honestly as possible. Then only can he claim to be a writer.

My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

What you see and what you listen to will determine how high you will go.

I quote others in order to better express my own self.

i write, because not breathing is not an option.

The world is a woven basket. Every stitch counts.

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.

Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.

Fighting and writing’s deepest layers of beauty lie not only in the physical and mental realms of what we know, but also as an incognizable instinct, a realm we will never fully know but will forever feel.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

I don’t existmetal pressed to pagesspilling blood, inkin vein each thought ragesSunlight shootingthrough a forest of pinesblack top windingand yellow dotted linesI am not hereonly a deep aching,a lightning flashand a tree trunk breakingSheets once alive covered in a deep redmark the presentbut I am not yet deadNothing is hereonly the rain and mistfresh air and soilI do not need to exist.

Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

You can't write a poem until you live.

I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it's shit. Write some more. Repeat.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Be the CEO of your own career.

I enjoy poetry where I can talk as bizarre as I please, but theology or philosophy, I always respect the truth by taking it a step further.

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.

A Writer Drenched in Words is Never Caught in a Dry Spell

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Old words are reborn with new faces.

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

Don't think because you can't affect something at a great level that God can't use you in a great way. David didn't even train one day with the armies but He won the war. He didn't even have a weapon but he killed a giant.

Hear about the hidden time. Some think the hidden time is yet to come. The Kingdom of God does not come by Observation. It is hidden in the inner dimension.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

If you're "one in a million", and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.

its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.

Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I'm hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he'll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I'm hoping he'll look at women as he does at men--that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of time we have here and the frustrations that it creates.

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

It's during a storm that the best songs get written.

The hardest things to write are often the best things to read. And the most deserving to be written.

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة

When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins.

For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something — distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world — but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before.

Some writers aren't writers, they are mere escapees' and refugees' on an exile from the jungle of thoughts.

On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.I kept on walking.

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together''Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)

Let your words be your voice. And let your voice be heard within the hearts of others.

Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

You're never as good a writer as you think you are, and you're never as bad. Just keep reading and writing, writing, writing.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled.

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy…

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

I journal my joy, and my joy expands exponentially forevermore. So be it.