Writing Quotes - Page 38

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

God's perspectives requires persistence. To have God's perspective in the world we live in requires persistence.

Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

sometimes i am not sure.if i am writing the poemor the poemis writing me.

This is our skin and nobody has the right to crumple us like a paper only to find another skin to write on, and then another, ruining people like they’re pages, like they are somehow replaceable. Because that will only leave our delicate and fragile selves into a tattered mess.

When you write, you are telling a story...to yourself. When you revise, you are telling a story to yourself...over and over again.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said "It is the trade entering his body.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.

Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.

What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion.

As a writer, I do not treat writing merely as a profession but more of as my "calling" and my way of life. In every waking hour and even in my deep sleep, creativity and imagination crawls through my inner core. Anyone can write but not everybody can capture that crystalline moment when magic unfolds and casts a spell on her readers." - Author/Poet Elizabeth Esguerra Castillo

Writers live in the world to write the sacred words.

You have seven writers in your basement?”Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

Any girl with a grin never looks grim.

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home.

There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not,then you miss the point of writing.

A writer may not know the way at first; but if he endeavors to complete his task, he carves a path with his story, a knowledge shortcut.

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

...'being published’ is not the same as being a real writer.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It's like an engine without fuel -- can't get anywhere without it. Or like a lighthouse without a light on top -- doesn't guide anyone in to home or safe harbor.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what

Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that emerges when it breaks.

Without imagination, writing is a stack of lumber, a sack of nails, and a locked tool shed.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons’ minds.

Vigorous writing is concise.

Let your passion bleed through your work. No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

I write what the Holy Spirit put on my mind.

Storytellers are individuals who enjoy creating a holiday for the mind.

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

Life is a sacred story.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

I don't imagine book elitists as my audience when writing. I dream about teachers, morticians and garbage men instead.

I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.

The 'one book' which hasn't been written yet, even thenpersistent a book is being written by me, and might never end!While, I survive inside my brain with someone.

A program of active reading and writing might be the hardest form of thinking, but it is also the most organized methodology of self-education. Reading exposes the mind to a world of ideas heretofore unimaginable and encourages the novice learner to write. Reading is a form a joint mediation and writing represents the product of several authors’ collective and collaborative minds at work.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

But it’s still a big fight to get the work you’re really excited about onto shelves. And past that, convincing someone to pay you to do the work that you are most excited about is more than a trick, it’s a fucking scam of a magic trick.

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

But 'why then publish?' There are no rewardsOf fame or profit when the world grows weary.I ask in turn why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.It occupies me to turn back regardsOn what I've seen or pondered, sad or cheery,And what I write I cast upon the streamTo swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.

Let's fall in love and screw up our lives even more?

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example