Writing Quotes - Page 43

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

When life gives you lemons ~ write about 'em!

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

One of my biggest influences as a writer is J. K. Rowling. I grew up with Harry Potter. One thing I absolutely loved was how every single person in Harry's world was so three-dimensional—it was as if each one was the main character in his or her own story and was just making a guest appearance in Harry's story. I strive to do that as a writer. I want every side character to be the main character of his or her own story.

He felt a deep urge to put some order in this chaos. Leaning against a large standing-stone by the wayside, he drew out his dreambook and began to write.

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

The pen is mightier than the sword as long as it doesn't run out of ink.

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity...edit one more time!

The grace of writing is upon me.I love writing. I write daily.

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment.

The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.

If ur laptop doesnt smell like fire then ur losing.

The greatest adventure is to have no fear for the blaze that lies ahead.

It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It’s a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: “So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun... The most evil trick about perfectionism, though, is that it disguises itself as a virtue.

Urban Fantasy is the orphan left on the doorstep that no-one knows what to do with.

He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.

A novelist's job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time, you need almost an empty mind, where you can let any image in, follow it along, and allow an emotional charge, almost the way actors and singers can work. The more instinct you have as a novelist, and the less intelligence, the better.

TODAY IS A GREAT DAY TO MAKE ART.

We write to give strength to our soul and to inspire spirit of other souls.

Real-life duties eat valuable writing time.

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

When you begin a new story, your job is to envision, to try to glimpse stuff that doesn't as yet exist. That's what writing is, going out to meet the ghosts of the future. Not out of the past, not the ones that are dead and buried. Ghosts of the future, those who don't exist yet.

What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so.

This was the sort of ebullience and élan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket.

Learning is essential for living the life you love.

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one.

... that same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache had written around the red blooms of her lip prints.

You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I'm absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you've lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

You are judged more by what you do passively than by what you do actively. If one billion of you watch and do not intercede as one million of you assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one billion of you are a billion times guilty.

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.

I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

Never durst a poet touch a pen to writeUntil his ink was tempered with love's sighs.

If you can't talk about, write about it!

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

You could write the best book in the world but if nobody knows about it, it is nothing

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, ... I was there on the page

There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

For that is what you are, that is who you are – you are an author. You cannot cease to write any more than you can cease to breathe...This difficult season will pass – your eyes and mind will inevitably be opened once more to the wealth of ideas all around you...And even if the ideas around you fall short of what you seek – even if, as you say, you have not the heart to write… perhaps it is your heart you ought to write of. - Laurie to Jo, on writing

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you’re too busy living.

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

Learn the rules before you break them.

Don't always use prudence for precaution, sometimes use it for progress.

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.

Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.

Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

I suppose one has to be desperate, to be a successful writer. One has to reach a rock-bottom at which one can afford to let everything go hang. One has got to damn the public, chance one's living, say what one thinks, and be oneself. Then something may come out.

Writing is the act of discovery.

I stopped writing in a way they would understand because it wasn’t for them or even him. It was for I to understand, for I to make sense, and for I to let go of it.