Writing Quotes - Page 64

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

As I approach a new project, my process always begins with the question: what is it about? Here’s one answer that might apply to a Star Trek movie... I want it to be about the most horrible, treacherous aliens ever known to man who are about to destroy life as we know it, leading to the most spectacular thrill ride of an adventure with fantastic space battles and huge explosions and great special effects -- a white knuckle ride for the movie audience. Yeah, but what’s it about?I can write space battles with the best of them, but what makes that space battle interesting to me is: why are they fighting? What are the stakes? What does the hero lose if he loses? And what does he win if he wins? Why should we care? I'm talking about the second level of story-telling. The level that examines what's going on inside the characters — their moral and ethical dilemmas, their doubts, fears, inner conflicts, how they change as the story progresses. These are the things that make us, as members of an audience, get emotionally involved.

A bad handwriting is as annoying to a reader … as an irritating voice is to a listener.

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

...it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.

If you were waiting for a sign that you’re meant to be a writer…THIS IS IT.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Books allow one to jump into another person's imagination while also exploring their own!

The power of classical music turns my words into fire.

My job is to inspire others to live full lives. Whether I do that through my writing or my actions are one in the same.

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).

If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately.

I could think, write or tell, instead I Lived and Created Myself!

How would you document the history of today?

As a writer, self-doubt is useless. Get rid of it, rip it out like a weed and compost it.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

If you never listen, you can't see. The devil has got so many people so disconnected that they cannot even listen or even sense when the Lord is speaking.

Bernard of Clairvaux shared with Goethe and Balzac the art of charging narratives with his own charisma (and this is probably the only context in which those three names can be mentioned in one breath). On the surface self-representation was not the purpose of such narratives; they presented themselves as fiction or as commentaries on scripture. Let me suggest the word 'autography' to describe the process. 'Autography' is writing yourself into your own composition, not by describing yourself, but by infusing your own presence into it. The reader feels your presence, but sees someone or something else.

I had to learn to live without you and I couldn't make sense of it, because I left so much of me inside of you.

His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.

Have the courage to walk in truth, the strength to love always, and the integrity to never stray away from doing so.

Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!

Write what you love. Fill your pages with the beating of your own heart, the breath from your own lungs. Live through your characters. Let your characters live through you. Then you will love what you write, and others will, too.

Give a poet a pen

how these words, wait to diein the arms of all the poetry..yet to be written.

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

I am amazed upon the many battle that we engage in, be it money, control or matters of the heart, only very few of us knows how to fight in the right way or understand who we are really fighting against. To win any battle you' ve got to have the right strategy and resources because victories don't come by accident.

I'm not just building a foundation or a house with the bricks people throw at me. I'm building entire worlds. it's called writing.

I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with right words-- I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or magician-- but a magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.

If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm.

Some stories are easy to follow, and easy to tell. There is an introduction, a twist, and a happily-ever-after. And when telling the story, everyone forgets those small details, like that one quiet morning when the two of you woke wake up with the sunrise and talked about cookies. Or that night when she had her period, and the cramps were killing her, and she just needed your hug and something warm.

Description is the color in the canvas of your story.

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon

I write with all my heart

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory.

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters.

Writing is a lifelong disease. Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.

A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations.

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

How many people make a career out of writing anyway?' Cath snapped. She felt like everything inside her was snapping. Her nerves. Her temper. Her esophagus. 'I'll write because I love it, the way other people knit or . . . or scrapbook. And I'll find some other way to make money.

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.

It’s not the destination (of seeking the truth) that creates our dignity or integrity, it’s the journey. From Messages From a Grandfather, by Robert Gately

It’s a new world. Stand up.

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.