Writing Quotes - Page 46

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

You ought to stop everything and write the sacred-words as its flashes in your mind.

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of

I die a little everyday, in trying to revive what I lost yesterday!

You have strength born of years of grief and anger... The strength of a man denied revenge.

Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

I only ever wanted to feel more human.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

I am what I have ever read

Day dreaming is actually research for the next book.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.

I was driven to go into book writing by the very nature of journalism and blogging. Both are ephemeral. Journalists and bloggers can have humongous egos. But in the end, what they write is really a passing show. I wanted something more lasting — a record of sorts, something people can look back to and relish again like hot, home–brewed coffee.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Artists shouldn't wait until they are told what their art should be, they shouldn't follow trends or allow other people to influence their work, an artist should only create from the strongest emotions within their heart

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

Online review sites are the slushpiles of feedback.

Writing is the great invention of the world.

Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.

Writers fly with imaginary wings.

If I had time, money and knowledge I could write about everything; but no problem, Google is already doing it

There shall be confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruate women shall bring forth monsters:

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Find peace in knowing.

Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.

James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once.

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know... M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute "M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Story of civilization starts with reading, and story of creativity starts with writing

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing.A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it turns out that he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same impulse.)

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever

A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Every reader wants the same thing: to open the cover of a book and watch the words explode like fireworks off the page.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

If there’s true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it.

His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.

There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in.

Write like you have many readers.

Imagine in vibrant, wonderful detail your heart’s desire—a reality only you can envision, an adventure only you can direct.Then cradle your creation. Caress it. Mold it. Coddle it until it comes to life.And when your precious treasure grows so grand as to steal your breath away, set it free for all the world to experience. For that is how you live your dreams.