Writing Quotes - Page 61

I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

It's 1am, I have fiction to write!

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

People believe in everything except the reality.

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

You don't have to position yourself in front of people to be used by God. You don't have to convince anyone that you are good enough for the voice of God, just be grateful that God chooses who He wills and once He is ready to use you, no devil in hell can stop Him.

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 life.", email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)

pencils racing across paper, a sound I like." Marisol

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

I've found that busting your ass on a daily basis to make your art good, clear, and meaningful creates the most luck.

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively re-polishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler's precision.But it was not good enough.He wanted the pages to sing with ideas that had once seemed so important to him, all and everything he knew, and yet they did not, and no amount of diligence was able to bring them to life. The story came to be a burden and weighed more heavily in his hands each time he lifted it out of the drawer. After a few weeks he was reluctant to open the desk at all.("Talking In The Dark")

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.

I write-down to speak-up.

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.

You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.

Effective marketing is saying the right thing to the right people at the right time.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

The tragedy of love is in its ending, the blessing—everything else. No love ever deserves to end.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

Sometimes we dream of things that we've always wanted--of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it...and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I have to write...so I do.

Ideas are the most fragile things in the world, and if you do not write them down, they will be lost forever.

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

Writing allows you the unique and uncensored expression of whatever wants to be spoken.

The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.

O Lord that bear rule, even we all are full of impiety. And for our sakes peradventure it is that the floors of the righteous are not filled, because of the sins of them that dwell upon the earth.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form.

Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight!

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

I feel like so much has been left undone. There are friends I won't see before I leave, there are bills I still need to pay. I haven't written as much as I've wanted, and there are countless things I've said that I wish I could correct, but this is a process that will never end. When my grandmother died she left a library full of books she never finished reading. This is how I feel now.

And ever, as the story drainedThe wells of fancy dry,And faintly strove that weary oneTo put the subject by,"The rest next time--" "It is next time!"The Happy voice cry.Thus grew the tale of Wonderland

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

If you're not creating, you're disintegrating.

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

An invisible, yet active current of mental energy, underscores any book as well as any other form of artistic creation. A creative burst of psychological energy ignites any creative project. The emotional energy that underlies the artistic work propels it forward endowing it with articulation, texture, rhythm, and movement. When the expressive energy of the artist flags, the work comes to a stopping point and it takes on its final composition.

Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.

Shut up and write.

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

A chef’s magic is his ingredients, how he can substitute one for another, then break with convention by changing it all around again without once referring to the recipe. And then just at the death complete the beauty by adding another element never previously thought of. Well words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation. Sometimes both the chef and the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.