Writing Quotes - Page 86

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

The perfect song neither ends nor begins. It is always playing. Remember to stop and listen.

Is this not the reason I write, to leave a piece of me behind?

Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.

Whenever I write I always transport myself into the story to get a better glimpse to what I am capturing.

Remember to have a little faith. When you die, I believe, God isn't going to ask you what you published. God's going to ask you what you wrote.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

The New World Order is established by degrees. The first degree is truth of the one subject, which follows from the existence and the oneness of the universe, and from the ancient belief that God is all-knowing.

He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.

We writers are a crazy group. I can't think of any other profession where the actual work is deep within, uncomfortable, and wanting out.

…you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of life…We are all crazy and crazed.

How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.'Is that a Luo expression?' I asked. Sayid's face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,' he said, 'but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa's predicament. the Nigerian, the Kenya - it is the same. We share more than divides us.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.

Our job as writers is to be as curious as a child, to see things for the first time, and to never assume. We must always be willing to surrender our idea of the story to allow the larger story to emerge. We are seeking to understand the nature of things, the underlying forces at work.

If you would be a reader read if a writer write.

I thought it was a novel.”“It is.”“What’s it about??”“You’ll have to buy it to find out, but it’s got everything: love, death and an amusing dog.”“This one’s got a recipe for apple crumble,” I said.“Don’t you love that about the novel? The capaciousness?” he said.

Death is not considerate, or fair.

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

The story comes, and it is pure story. That's all I set out to write. But I don't believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.

In a democracy government is the God.

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

They say that I am a poetI wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottleemotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle ondistant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and forthat matter as to whether I ever get my point acrossor my love

I have my priorities and I know my purpose. I do not Praise God because of my pain but I praise Him because of what the pain is producing.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!

If your writing fails to move the emotional needle, you are not reaching your readers.

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

writing is vulnerable is power is freedom.

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.", 1657)

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

When I discovered music — when I discovered the craft of shaping a song — my being fell into place.

The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it’s a winner’s trifecta and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams.

I don't write for a living. I live to write.

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you don't have it, don't become a writer

The starvation of a child has no justification, even if the crops have failed, or the population is too large.

Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them?