Writing Quotes - Page 33

It's a way of clearing the palate. Kids come into the classroom with all this other stuff in their hands. If they write it down for 10 minutes they become much more available for whatever it is we want to do in the class.

I believe it’s incredibly important to write against [racial] stereotypes. If we give in and make sure that all black women characters are asexual, gentle, and kind we wind up with another set of stereotypes.

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

The world is with you.

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Writing is the hum. Writing is laying track. Writing is the high. Now imagine that hum, that high, that track to be laid is behind a door. And that door is five miles away. Those five miles are just . . . writing crap and doodling and trying to have an idea and surfing the internet and hoping like hell not to get so distracted that you give up. Worse? Those five miles are lined with brownies and cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones and Idris Elba waiting to talk to only you and really good novels to read. Every time I sit down to write, I have to mentally run those five miles past all of that to get to that door. It’s a long, hard five-mile run. Sometimes I am almost dead by the time I reach the door. That’s why I have to keep doing it. The more often I run the five miles, the fitter I become. And the fitter I become, the easier the run begins to feel and the less fresh and exciting all that stuff on the side of the road seems. I mean, how long has it been there? More important, as I get fitter, I can run faster. And the faster I can run, the faster I can get to that door. The faster you can too, writers out there. When you sit down to write every day, it becomes easier and easier to tap into that creative space inside your mind. The faster I can get to that door, the quicker I can get to the good stuff.

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing

Be anxious for no thing, be concerned about the state of your soul and that of your children, be concerned about God's work in the world; these are genuine concern but when it comes to the things in your life.....be not anxious. If God is for us who can be against us?

He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

If you can't see the assets in you, it will be hard for you to export it to the world. Recognise who you are and the world will recognise you.

Only write a story that only you can write.

I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of me to create it, but I didn’t know where to begin. A month after giving birth to the idea, I felt like I was losing my mind. Ideas would pop into my head in the middle of the night, or during a midterm, and I missed them, quite narrowly, almost every time. Every time an idea left my mind without taking the shape of a word on paper, my mind would automatically begin to churn something just as impressive, or at least close to it. I was digging myself into a shallow grave, and I was getting nowhere. And this was even before the thoughts were committed to paper.

Freedom of expression is more than a fashion statement.

You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it

The human mind is itself a miraculous machine. I am writing right now, but I have no idea how this is happening. I know that my brain is composed of a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and a medulla oblongata, but these are just words. I know that electrical impulses are involved somehow, but that is about the extent of my understanding of the mechanics. And while I at least have an intuition as to how an airplane works, I really have none with respect to my brain. Frankly, lots of what appears on my computer screen is as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I certainly never expected over my oatmeal and English muffin this morning to be writing about Bernoulli's principle today. For that matter, I have no idea why I like English muffins. But I do.

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Sometimes a writer simply finds new ways of saying what has already been said because, ultimately, truth is unoriginal.

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

We encounter great souls by reading great books.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

I wouldn't go back to ashes or dustWords gave me life and in them I will surrenderFrom words to words..

A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.

We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning.

Show me the contract.

After seven days of fasten so it was, that the thoughts of my heart were very grievous unto me- and my soul recovered the spirit of understanding.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

You cannot choose your face but you can choose your dress.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

I am writing just to inspire you, encourage you, empower you, and give you hope when you are fighting your life's battle.

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.

I am surprised to see how much I have written; with stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down. But words are very inadequate – anyway, my words are.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."[From the preface.]

We like to take credit when we get a new idea, as if we originated the idea in our brain, but what we actually did was no less extraordinary: we channeled the idea.

We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

If where you are is worthwhile then where you are from doesn't matter.

Once you realize life is magic, you will never look upon the world with dimmed eyes again.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - "Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi".

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.

Everyone, except a writer, thinks writing is easy. Writing is tough. Being a disciplined writer is tougher.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.