Writing Quotes - Page 37

Success involves failing first. Ask any successful person. Ask any experienced person, really. It's all part of the creative process, so sit back and allow the artist within you to sprout, blossom and flourish. You must accept that your first, second, and third attempt at something might suck. It's a necessary step in improving your skill. Failure is your teacher, not your judge.

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.

But for many writers, and to borrow a popular cliché, it’s like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inner critic comes out to play. It silences your creativity. You feel you aren’t allowed to make mistakes.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

Tales of triumph are my favourite.

Ill love you with every little bit of everything that has ever consumed me and I will forever love you and forever find you in every life time and so on. Until the stars die out and the universe leaps but even then, my love will remain.

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

Writing has power but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind but they can't direct it. Time changes things God changes things the dictators change things but writers can't change anything.

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

Imagination is manifest of thoughts by divine force.

A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.

In the still of the night, when you are serenely falling asleep and an epiphany suddenly hits you. Roll your ass off that bed and start typing because that fleeting moment will never pass by you again...You can sleep when your dead!!!

A doctorate study is the passion for extensive research, reading, thinking and writing.

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

There is no truth without faith. Nothing is proven except to the heart of one who believes.

The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.

Being a writer is 1% inspiration, 50% perspiration and 49% explaining you're not a millionaire like J.K.Rowling.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention--a thought that whispers constantly in the ear of any author who respects their readers.

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

Never a day without a line.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.

Sometimes your diary is the perfect listener.

I have the word of God and my bible is very interesting, this book was conceived in battle, Jesus Christ our Saviour was conceived in brokenness, out of barenness to redeem a people who were in bondage to their sin. I know exactly where to go when the people start getting confused, trading lies for truth, buying injustice for justice and even when the media starts to show me the prospectives of the world that I am living in, I have my prospective from the word of God.

Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense but that ability is at the bottom of writing I am sure.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Give all of life’s oxygen to the fire that is your soul.

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.

A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

You are responsible for everything you post and everything you post will be a reflection of you. [Social Media]

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. Terrified of squandering our existence, we each seek to break out from our muteness and strike an accord with our brothers and sisters whom share our inherent desire to reach a global consilience.

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

I have fallen in love with writing, unknowingly. Instead of thinking whether people will like what I write or not, I decide to write only for one person- myself! I told myself that ‘I as an author is going to entertain I as an audience.’ And everything changed that day!When you find your passion, don’t succumb to the pressure of succeeding.Follow your passion just for yourself and for the sheer joy of it. You will see amazing things will follow- that’s a guarantee.

Writing is a process of creating yourself again and again for an ever-searching mind.

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I was also exhausted by the effort. I clearly wasn't in shape. You don't just tie on a pair of running shoes and go out and run a marathon. You have to be in running shape, just like you have to be in writing shape.

I am made of words. Cut me & I bleed sentences. Read me, & I speak to your soul.

Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence.

In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not saying a character hasn’t somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her.

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter’s cursive writing.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps.

Honestly...this is why I write.I write to get the happy ending I sometimes feel is eluding me.I write for my sanity.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

I wisely started with a map.

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

Make dance the mission every moment seeks to accomplish.

We are all planted in God's vineyard and our lives are filled with potentials and purpose and we have all been given the hopes to anchor our lives even in the most disappointed times. So God is waiting to see what you and I will make out of the raw materials that He has given to us. He is waiting to see what we will make out of the discouragement and disappointment. I believe that in those deepest places of disappointment that the greatest grace will manifest.