Writing Quotes - Page 59

The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it but it takes brains to build a house.

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they.

I would rather spend money on something, that fulfills me for eternity. Rather, than something that fulfills me for only an hour or two.

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

Every letterthat she types;every keystrokethat she strikes-To spell your nameagain and again,is all she everwants to write.

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

During a conversation, listening is as powerful as loving.

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show….

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White? There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.

The pages afforded glimpses into my soul where I'd hidden it, behind masks of paper and ink.

However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime’s memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller’s window.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.

The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.

...the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking...the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum...to walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

Bitch, if I ain't a G, I'm an OG

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!

People don't believe me when I tell them I'm a magician who makes portals to other worlds. So I tell them I'm a writer instead.

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.JOEL: I know.CLEMENTINE: What do we do?JOEL: Enjoy it.

Good poetry reveals the beauty of joy and tragedy.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

There's writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.

The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.

...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Be determined. Be persistent. Be consistent," the muse said. "Then he looked at me and winked. "Never give up, dumb-ass.

A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.

It's just not as hot without biting, scratching, and spanking, involved.

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

When a day goes by and I haven't written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.

After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Swedenfor they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?

Writing is an exemplary means to make contact with the whole of the self. What ultimately makes up the self is a collation of personal knowledge derived from physical, mental, and emotional experiences. The only way to divine the self is to understand what comprises its constituent components. The self is what we do, think, and act. Writing is not merely a documenter of the actions of the self. Writing, similar to other artistic activities, is one of the fundamental activities that a self can perform.

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

I am so glad that God's disappointment in me is not greater than his love and I still have a Destiny. I am growing in grace and mercy because that is the only soil that can produce the kind of life that God desires.

Dedicate your life to solitude and mortify your members which are upon the earth.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

We write to strengthen our soul and the spirit of other souls.

Suddenly, everything was beautiful. The way she viewed the world was nothing more but a reflection of herself.

Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.

My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane.

As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.