Writing Quotes - Page 84

Poems are invisible flowers on my skin.

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.

The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.

If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.

Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.

When I read my writing, am amazed by what I have captured in a given moments.

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

Well, let me try again,' he said. 'If it be true, and no doubt it is, that the proper study of mankind is man, it is also true that man is best studied in the books that he has written about himself; and all books, whatever their subject matter, are in essence autobiographical... Wherefore, it is clear - or is it? - that writers of books are what I have called them, the most fascinating people in the world.

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

A book gets rejected because it's not ready to be published.

What is a writer?A writer is a magician who can create a masterpiece With a wave of a pencilA writer has the key to a new worldCapturing readers and taking them on a roller coaster ride away from realityBut a writer can be a commanding tyrantOr a hypnotist stealing mindsWhat is a writer?A writer is a powerful being, an intelligent thinkerAnd an artist creating mind pictures through words.A writer is a keeper of secretsOr like a roomful of words waiting for a bookBut a writer is also a puppet master taking controlWith no strings attachedWhat is a writer?A writer is a true friendUsing words to spread smiles to the worldA writer is…..The voice of the hear

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces aren't even fixed in shape. Yet, somehow, they all come together in the end to form the complete picture.

I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

An assembly is extra slow in taking actions.

Believe in your characters with all your heart, & they will believe in you. Only then will they trust you enough to reveal themselves. -RCSJR

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

A $3 Cup of Coffee is Worth a Book.

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

Action achieves ambition.

Be creative.

The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.

You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

My spouse is my shield, my spouse is my strength.

An idea is a gift, a finished project is turning that gift into a book by making yourself write even when you don't want to. There is no such thing as a block of time to write. You have to carve time from a busy day. Elaine L. Orr

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

Memang sulit menulis puisi. Dan untuk apa mempersulit diri sendiri.

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

I just write whenever I can.

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above all else, she didn't care what other people thought about her. But after a while, she started to take on a personality of her own, and I was suddenly more interested in her story than I was in mine.

Life in society is when everyone is there and no one is present. Life in society is when everyone obeys what no one wants. Writing is a way of escaping this impoverishment, a variation on solitude like love or gambling – a principle of insubordination, a virtue of childhood.

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.

All of us [writers] failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.