Writing Quotes - Page 92

I'm 20 years old. I spend my days in a dictionary and half my mind in Fantasy.

There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.

Elegant writers depict intricacy with simplicity.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They're often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.

Creativity is salve for the soul

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.", 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]

Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

[Everything you write is] not simply a collection of words, but a means of influence not to be taken lightly. Let your recipient's emotions be the gondola, and your words, its gondolier.

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do—a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; ... a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy.

The two seasons; deepest winter from above and nascent spring from below, created a juxtaposition that drew the scene into the land of legend sitting only a heartbeat away behind a translucent river of time.

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.

Identify yourself,” Colleen demanded. “I’ve got a bat and I will beat the living shit out of you if you so much as blink. I’ve got a black belt,” she lied frantically, “and…and…a gun. A big one.” - Colleen O’Brien

Story, it turns out, is the assassin of despair.

In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman: For like as a woman that travails make haste to escape the necessity of the travail: even so do these places haste to deliver those things that are committed unto them.

I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.

Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.

My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista--streets I cannot relinquish--I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can I go there and find it again?"--Tennessee Williams

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

Keep on reading, thinking, doing and writing! Words keep introducing their friends to you.

I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room

Working together as a team helps build a cohesive organization.

I read not for entertainment but to feel what the writer has felt while writing even though if it was fiction.

What is my strength, that I should hope? Is my strength the strength of stone? Or is my flesh of brass? Is not my help in me.

Creativity begins with a walk with nature.

Transcend the terrestrial; surpass the celestial, from nature’s hands when you receive the sublime pleasures of dance.

You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.

How many pages will it take to tell your story?

There's no rule for better writing. It's best to make your own rules, and see what works best for you.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.

The mistakes of the world are warning message for you.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

It's like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back in again and the moment I'm back in, it just keeps on going and going again...all of this, so I can find things out and then I write about the things I find out so you can find them out from me. All the bruises, all the wounds, all the bumps on the head, all the scars, just so I can take that and I can write all these things, and sometimes I say "God, I don't want to be in this roller coaster anymore." But when I think about it, if I'm not right here, then where the hell would I be? On the sidewalk? I wasn't born to stand on the sidewalk, I was born to fly around crazy in the sky!

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.

From an author's point of view, the most painful and dangerous weapon ain't no gun or blade, but a piece of paper with the word rejected on it.

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy.

I feel like I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, But I've kept pretty stable. That's because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion as long as it's only a song. It works for me, and I don't want to change it. I don't have anything left for writing.

My words shouldn’t be trophies to look at, but seeds to continue the cycle of Life.