Writing Quotes - Page 74

Did you ever think about writing memoirs? You are a writer, and it may be interesting for people to read your story."I hate memoirs. But I am sure I will write a book about the Bowery Mission,” Michael said.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

Writing is capturing life, recording the human condition, and trying to glean meaning from it.

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

A POCKET-SIZED GIRLHe keeps me in his pocket for a rainy day; he swears I'm not an object as he yo-yo's me away.A friend is what we'll call it,but my friend, he does not know,each time it rains I love him— so to his pocket, I must go.He thinks he's being clever,but I am not a fool;his love ain't worth a penny,so to my heart I must be cruel.

The inner dimension and the hidden time have already been discovered.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

She cannot: but must do it by distance of time.

To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.

Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.

Authors - trust in your vision.

When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.

Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it evident that you posted what was 'good enough for government work,' don't try and fake it. Give it your best, your all, not for pence, but for the love of the craft. Do these things, as these writers and scores I have not named do, bring to your work your self, your heart, your voice, motherly or youthful, lawyerly or priestly, conservative or liberal, it matters not. Do this and I and hundreds of others will return again and again to your work, not merely because we may have a burning need for a new printer or an abiding interest in college newspapers or what have you, but because we wish to spend time with your mind and voice.

I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.

I left the bankbecause they wouldn’t deposit my cheque of poems.So I went to the store,but they didn’t acceptmy currency of words.So I boxed all my storiesand took them to charity.But they refused my donation and asked me to give blood instead.I opened the notebooks and made them look, 'What do you think I wrote these in?

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

ligion is the opiate of the masses." "I did masses of opiates religiously.

And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this--letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I've suffered, how much I've been through, but most importantly how far I have come.

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.

These poems are cupsthat I pour my life into.Here, Drink!

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.

There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.

That night I didn’t say anything. I just watched you leave and in the end, I just stayed sleeping awake. Somewhere between a sweet dream and a beautiful nightmare, hoping one day you’d return to rid me of the demons you left behind.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.

Blank pages are cruelPure torture in white or beigeBut how else to start

There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.

If we accept the premise that we’re always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses… and tell a good story.

The pen that was once a gift has come to represent all that I hope to achieve.

In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.

For the curious, I write

My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.

The truth is we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question...I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

*Persistence is more important than perfection. If at first you don’t succeed, it doesn’t matter as long as you always try, try again; *Small improvements, made consistently, add up; *You cannot fail unless you quit. What most people call failures are merely unsuccessful experiments. Failures are bumps on the road as long as your story remains a work in progress; *You can always do better with what you already have - and often, it’s much smarter to find ways to do so than to invest time and money trying something entirely new as your next one sure thing; *And most importantly, being good doesn’t matter nearly as much as being slightly better than yesterday.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.", Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.