Writing Quotes - Page 68

A liar with a pen is a writer

Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.

Writing is my passion, expression and an incessant obsession.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Receiving very little or no feedback from my writing I really don't know if people like it or if they are actually reading any of my work for that matter. Still I will continue to write regardless. I suppose it is similar to people who talk just to hear their own voice. I write simply to see my own thoughts in print.

An anti-hero is just a villain you spend a lot of time with.

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, so what happens when the person's eyes are unavailable to look into? You read their words.

I love writing, but I would be able to love it more if that love wasn’t motivated by fear of homelessness.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

Dialogue doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage.

I go with the flow but I write against it.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.

It seemed to me - articulated in words of today - that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

Like a splendid mosaic of myriad colors, she in all her hues of sensitivity would paint her feelings in your mind’s gray skies. She was the butterfly making you run after her. She was the Zahir, a mirage that transcended borders and time-zones.

Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.

My biggest fear is forgetting why I fell in love with writing. My biggest dream is never allowing that to happen.

Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

There is no greater crime against humanity than usury.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

A true understand of oneself is vital. Writing enables us to act as a sun in our own universe, to become the perfect overseer, and observe the innumerable changes in the seasons of life. Writing is an intense form of self-exploration, and through thoughtful encounters with the humble self, we grow, and that growth diminishes unhappiness and creates joy.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

So what? All writers are lunatics!

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.

Life. Is a sentence, therein, weave your story toward freedom.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures

Although my work is to grapple with words, I have no words with which to describe and explain this feeling. Perhaps I write stories to show that in life there are moments, emotions, and events that cannot be explained with words.

Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.

He took the pen and book from her and faltered.“Just write anything – anything trivial that won't matter if it comes to pass.”“Erm...” God, he was useless at this.Elena's hair turned blue.“Hey!”“What?”“I don't want blue hair! What the hell did you write that for?”“It seemed trivial.”“Blue hair – blue? That's trivial? What if I can't undo it?”Karl stared at her blankly. His throat went dry. He felt like a total dickhead, but writing really wasn't his strong point, so he went for humour instead and flashed her a grin.“I was going to write that all your clothes fall off, but figured you may have a problem with that. This was the second thing that came to mind.”(Karl and Elena)

You cannot free someonewho is caged intheir own self.

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flowers that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.

I have inflammation of the imagination.

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

Writers are engineers of human souls.

One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to live a footprint in the sands of history when giants are passing through the same sands unless you are one of the giants

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

You’re not a bad person, you’re just a little bit different and I’m a sucker for that.

I wouldn’t say “art” as much as “virtue,” in the ancient Greek sense of “andreia” – manly action – or “arete,” excellence. In my experience, Resistance kicks in any time we try to move ourselves from a lower plane to a higher. In other words, when we try to align with the better parts of our nature. This move can be creative (art) or physical (athletics) or it can be ethical, moral or spiritual. Have you ever tried to meditate? I have and it kicks my butt every time. Spiritual stuff is hard! But so is making “cold calls” if you’re opening a new business. Somehow the principle is the same. We’re trying to overcome our natural laziness, selfishness, sloppiness, etc. So I wouldn’t say “art,” I’d say “virtue.

My mind can be ugly. But when I read something of mine that I think is beautiful, I'm reminded mind can be beautiful too.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.

Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.

it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants.

Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.

At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another.

Every impression ever made on a person from newborn babyhood onwards will contribute to the shape and texture of the imagination.