Writing Quotes - Page 4

Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.

With writing, we have second chances.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic...

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?'("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours there is no life without them.

My pen shall heal, not hurt.

She might be a natural-born cynic, but she knew the right word when she heard it.

Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?

I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.

If my life was pulled into the pages of a book, there would be coffee stains and wrinkles along the lines of that narrative. Because all I can wish is that the book of my life would be well read and well loved. Living within words and the sound of writing.

So, the darkness hid the little girl in herself,to protect her from the wolves with the human mask on their faces.

It is the writer's job to craft a story so compelling that strangers will pay to hear it.

I am an Author a person who plays with words so they can dance in the minds of others

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

Real faith looks beneath the surface. Real faith knows that faith works sometimes in dark places. Real faith knows that sometimes in order to see a change, you will have to steer through your situation to really see it.

Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction—which is naive and misplaced—that being published has to do with being “good” while not being published has to do with being “amateur.” ...“Did you write today?”“Yes.”“Then you’re a writer today.”It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It’s not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final “credit” must come from.

Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.

See my blog at crossedeyesanddottedtees.wordpress.com for more of my writing.

The length of words used to explain something does not determine the quality of the thought. Yet, I tend to believe that the shorter one can say something, the better it is.

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life?

Writing is the only way to change the world without leaving bed.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That’s a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seen.

A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.

Good" now is better than "Best" never.

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

To conquer fear, you must become fear - you must bask in the fear of the BOOK... and men fear most what they cannot see- The Power of the Book is spiritual.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

I wish I had another chance to write that school composition, 'What I Did Last Summer.' When I wrote it in fifth grade, I was scared and just recorded: 'It was interesting. It was nice. My summer was fun.' I snuck through with a B grade. But I still wondered, How do you really do that? Now it is obvious. You tell the truth and you depict it in detail: 'My mother dyed her hair red and polished her toenails silver. I was mad for Parcheesi and running the sprinkler catching beetles in a mason jar and feeding them grass. My father sat at the kitchen table a lot staring straight ahead, never talking, a Budweiser in his hand.

Never give your opinion on someone's writing unless they ask sincerely, and never ask for someone's opinion unless you're sincere.

As for the tokens whereof thou ask me, I may tell thee of them in part: but as touching thy life, I am not sent to shew thee.

If I should ask thee how great dwellings are in the midst of the sea, or how many springs are in the beginning of the deep, or how many springs are above the firmament, or which are the outgoings of paradise: Peradventure thou would say unto me, ‘I never went down into the deep, nor as yet into hell, neither did I ever climb up into heaven.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.

Genetic code is a divine writing.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

Her words are her wings. She's flying.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.

You'll be amazed how much you have in common with Edith Wharton (who struggled to feel worthy of success), Louisa May Alcott (who badly needed money), Madaleine L'Engle (who could have papered an entire house with her rejection letters) and other writers...

We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.