Writing Quotes - Page 35

A childhood filled with adventures, happiness and unabated love.If only I could remember ...

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.

Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.

Writing is the easiest way to escape from the real world.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.

Writing's in the nouns.

Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?”She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.”“What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her.“Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied.“Choices,” he echoed.“Of who they become.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago walked into, the father who used to carry you on his shoulders high above the crowds at the summer fair, his body now ashes and shards of bone. You hold these things in place on a page, you walk through that door, touch his face and smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and in his shirt, you make things breathe again in words. You feel the lightness of a ghostly touch across your skin. In that small house on the corner, the porch light suddenly comes on.

I write to reach eternity

You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.

I am the sum of my past experience.Some people have got a lot to answer for.

Every traveler should make their own observation.

Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.

Maybe the key to finding the perfect song is simply rewriting the lyrics.

Great stories changed our heart and penetrated our soul.

Through her eyes the day was new and anything was possible.

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument

The best writing speaks when the heart whispers.

What could a person like Emily do? Could she possibly satisfy both sides? Or would that only end badly?

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.

Historical gap is created due to missing written records.

...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

The heart of a story gives it life.

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

As a writer, my job is to change your perspective, and make you think outside the box.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.

Writers don’t get time off. Every moment - waking or sleeping - a writer is working, observing, thinking and creating.

In order to protect their good names for posterity, many writers never wrote what they thought or the truth as it stood. That's why truth still lies hidden in matters of power, sex and religion. No wonder they chose to do so, many who dared paid with their heads

Food shouldn’t be that shade of green, lass.” – Faolán MacIntyre

It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over."Houses Under The Sea

Every story needs some sort of secret that impels it forward. Otherwise why would the reader bother to keep on turning the pages?

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abru

I've decided I don't like books that end with 'The End'. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out

Sometimes God wraps destiny in what we perceive as just another day. The same day that David's father asked him to go and deliver bread to his brothers in the field was the same day that God used him to bring goliath down. Take every minute in your life serious.

I don’t want to write a book which will bring me fame for just an hour. I will try to write something which may not be very popular but it may last forever.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.” ― Gustave Flaubert

To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.

When we live holy we will glorify self but when we glorify God we will live holy

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.

Writing, it's Feeling. spontaneous urges touching upon each of the senses the moment the pen magnetises into fingertips spilling out currents of words in panicked ink splatters, unmanaged, unfiltered & channeled.wept out, breath subtle,surrounded by empty sound. static brush,while wrist sweeps across lanes,crossing lines, giving in,its desperation, its surrender,where its heading,where its been.

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

Men have external genitalia, while women have internal genitalia. This simple difference makes a lot of difference in how they write about themselves—and how you might write about your characters. Male writers don’t often address internal sensation in a character, because they don’t experience it (and probably often don’t realize consciously that it’s there). This accounts for a lot of Really Terrible sex scenes written by men (if you look at the “Bad Sex-Scene Awards” in any given year, you’ll see that the vast majority are done by male writers).