Writing Quotes - Page 91

This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.

If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.)

Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it’s eaten in the author’s belly.

Writing in the first person helps to make clear the author's role in constructing rather than discovering the story/knowledge.

You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step toward literacy celebrity. You used to write what you believed to be urbane sketches infinitely superior to those appearing in the magazine every week. You sent them up to Fiction; they came back with polite notes. "Not quite right for us now, but thanks for letting us see this." You would try to interpret the notes: what about the word now-do they mean that you should submit this again, later? It wasn't the notes so much as the effort of writing that discouraged you.

Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

If you opened the dictionary and searched for the meaning of a Goddess, you would find the reflection of a dancing lady.

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn't pay by the hour.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Discovery's friend is creativity

Every writer without exception is a masochist a sadist a peeping Tom an exhibitionist a narcissist an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

Your whole being is deeply troubled- personified the vision of a child's purity, lost in the wilderness of an ever-unchanging and imperfect world.

This book is a story, and like all stories, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart.Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master Molière. He had high ambitions and scorned what I wrote as frivolous and feminine.‘All these disguises and duels and abductions,’ he said contemptuously, one day a year or so after our affair began, slapping down the pile of paper covered with my sprawling handwriting. ‘All these desperate love affairs. And you wish me to take you seriously.’‘I like disguises and duels.’ I sat bolt upright on the edge of my bed. ‘Better than those dreary boring plays you write. At least something happens in my stories.’‘At least my plays are about something.’‘My stories are about something too. Just because they aren’t boring doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy.’‘What are they about? Love’ He clasped his hands together near his ear and fluttered his eyelashes.’‘Yes, love. What’s wrong with writing about love? Everyone longs for love.’‘Aren’t there enough love stories in the world without adding to them?‘Isn’t there enough misery and tragedy?’Michael snorted with contempt.‘What’s wrong with wanting to be happy?‘It’s sugary and sentimental.’‘Sugary? I’m not sugary.’ I was so angry that I hurled my shoes at his head.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three

I am happiest sitting against a tree, with my notebook or sketchpad on my knee, capturing the moment.

Write what should not be forgotten.

Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn't hurt when you're done, you're probably doing something wrong.

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

Eventually I’ll stop writing about you and it’ll be bittersweet. Not because I’m not in love with you, but because I’ll just love you.

In a democracy, there will be more complaints but less crisis, in a dictatorship more silence but much more suffering.

Sometimes, God doesn’t send you into a battle to win it; he sends you to end it.

Create a character with an obsession, then follow.

Surrounded by enemies, surrounded by evil, surrounded by darkness, injustice......."don't be afraid , those who are with us are more than those who are with them"2 Kings 6:16

I like performing because it's direct contact with live people. I write a good deal of the time but that's introspective creation rather than interaction.

As an author the question I get asked the most is, “why do you write?” My knee jerk response is, “Because I love it,” which is true, but not the whole truth. So here is my revised response to that question; “I write for the thirteen year old me who hated reading and craved something different than the boring literature I was forced to read for school. I write to see something I want to read exist in the world. I write because it becomes unbearable to hold so many stories in my head without a way to express them, but most importantly, I write to be true to myself.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.

I'm the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table with while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel. You went to parties with writers, cultivated a writerly persona. You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch. F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

Stop making excuses and start making history.

The enemies agenda is destruction, his strategy is division and his tactics is on little differences. Mind you he is not going to be happy until he sees you divided.

Positive thoughts shape a positive world.

The author & the reader "know" each other: they meet on the bridge of words

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

I don't know what I was hoping for. Some small praise, I guess. A bit of encouragement. I didn't get it. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out. She said she'd read my stories and found them morbid and dispiriting. She said literature was meant to uplift the heart and that a young woman such as myself ought to turn her mind to topics more cheerful and inspiring than lonely hermits and dead children."Look around yourself, Mathilda," she said. "At the magnificence of nature. It should inspire joy and awe. Reverence. Respect. Beautiful thoughts and fine words."I had looked around. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. I'd seen a bear cub lift it's face to the drenching spring rains. And the sliver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I'd seen them and loved them. But I'd also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest days.

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

Hanging out is good historical methodology.

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .

Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.

If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases.

If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?

Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!

Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet.

I write out of revenge.

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.