Writing Quotes - Page 87

I like to make blank pages darker. It's this thing I do.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The more desperate the situation, the more opportunity for miracle. If you need something from God, you need to be at the right place, the right position and at the right time

Greatest irony of life is living in self glory while glorifying God which is the ultimate joy is left behind.

A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then.

Every sacred soul must walk and keep the way of God in the wilderness for years, to begin the sacred writings.

The only thing more interesting than the truth is fiction dressed up as the truth.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;

If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?’ But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

As we write we summon little demons.

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

If one thousand of you participate in the murder of one child, then one thousand of you are a thousand times guilty.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. tIf someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say:t'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!

When I sit down and write, I do it to relieve myself of the madness that burdens me so that new words can wrap me in newer, better, madness.

Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.

I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.

As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here— we’re not put on earth— to shape it anyway we want... You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say, “Well, what’s the use of a cloud? What’s the use of a river? What’s the use of a tree?” They don’t make anything happen.

Writing my blog has saved me thousands on therapy.

If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.

In God’s Kingdom there are no overnight sensations or flash-in-the-pan successes.Anyone who wants to be used of God will experience hidden years in the backside of the desert. During that time the Lord is polishing, sharpening and preparing us to fit into His bow, so at the right time, like “a polished shaft” He can launch us into fruitful service. The invisible years are years of serving, studying, being faithful in another person’s ministry and doing the behind-the-scenes work. The Bible says, ‘God is not unjust; he will not forget your work’ (Hebrews 6:10 NIV 2011 Edition). Be patient; when the time is right He will bring forth the fruit He placed inside you.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

...and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.

Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

It is the sweat of the servants that make their squire look smart.

Next to motherhood, I personally believe that being an author is the best job in the world.

For those of you who are begging God for a breakthrough, this is not the way of getting something from your heavenly father, you don't have to beg him for what He already bought for you, you don't have to beg Him for what He died to give you. You don't have to convince people, you don't have to convince anybody if God likes to do a work in your life, it is done.

Take your hands off my sentences, asshole. I sweat blood for that shit.

A clever trick does not a concept make.

Inking is meditation in liquid form...

I was mistaken when I said you live in my heart. How absurd I was when you live in my fingertips so that everything I touch is you. How foolish I was when you live in my toes so that everywhere I go there's you. How senseless of me to say you live in my heart when you breathe in my lungs, walk on my mind, and drink in my mouth. I came to pen another poem for you, but even every unwritten poem is you.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

We pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our life is astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn't have enough the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great. The truth, however, was there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.

Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review is what got me started reading Tolstoy in the first place. How can anyone write without using metaphor and simile? That would be like—never mind.)

Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.

The surest path to success is to learn to have a healthy relationship with failure. If we aren't failing, then we aren't doing anything interesting.

At the end of all things, why do lovers break up? Because love is magic. You have to believe, for it to exist.

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave her inspiration. However her heart lacked the will as the empty words enclosed her soul pulling it down towards the frenzied ravenous imps that stalked hells pantry....

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.

Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial...a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.

My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

Time unfolds beauty, wonder, and mystery to reveal the auspicious tapestry of life.