Writing Quotes - Page 40

That’s why I wanted to be a writer - because someone I loved told me I could be one.

Write truthfully, write from the heart, and your words will live.

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

And all that time I was lying to my support group. I told the ladies, "Sure! I'm writing!" when I wasn't. Yes, I could have filled all those newfound minutes with actual work, but I had no confidence in myself. I was a fraud. Who was I to pick up a pen and expect anything good to come out of it? I expected perfection as soon as the pencil hit the paper, and since that's impossible, I couldn't get myself to start. Then I felt guilty about not starting, which made me want to start even less. And with no game to bury the feelings, I got very depressed. No wonder I didn't book any acting jobs in the last half of 2006. No one wanted to hire a clinically depressed person to sell snack foods.

there are words inside me that don’t want to hide anymore.Perfect or not, they don’t want to be safe for much longer.They want to be free.

Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure.

If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.

Sacred-thoughts flashes in your mind at sacred-time. If you don’t write it immediately, it will be forgotten.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

When wealth goes only happiness goes, when health goes even the hope goes.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

So what was it then exactly, this truth-telling? ... It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life —of so many more than we think—can never be explained at all.

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Writing has become more than just a profession, and hobby…it has become a way to express my feelings and pour my entire soul into the pages of my books. Thank God for the little things in life that makes us feel infinite and tranquil…the little things that make way for us to escape reality and enter new worlds that we create. -Nina Jean Slack

One shot is all anyone needs if they back themselves and do it right.

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.

The things of the world fell by the wayside . . . but literature was eternal.

I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.

Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.

a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

Life is a book. We are writing the stories of our lives.

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.

Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.

I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Life is a great Book. We are writing the history of our time.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

When I have written my last word, I will have taken my last breath.

There’s no such thing as writer’s block, so long as you’ve had plenty of time to think about what you want to write.

There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen.  And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths.  Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale.

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

There is a remedy and there is a hope but the remedy is not in the political party or in places that will take you away from hope. You better run to God, that is the only place you can find both.

I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.

All the truth of God are discoverable through every day life.

Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you've done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes even happiness. writing is of a specific purpose & states a meaning within what is written.

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything.

A journey of the mind – a written vision quest – has only one goal: to interact with the world and attempt to develop the dormant intellectual and spiritual awareness of the author.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

Maybe I am just an old fool with foolish thoughts, but those foolish thoughts allow this old fool to sleep quite comfortably at night.

There’s nothing worse than being violently jerked away from creativity.

I never met a word I didn't love

A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.