Writing Quotes - Page 93

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.

THE POLITICIANIf it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition. Jellyfish!CATHERINEEspecially since you can't rob the people anyway.THE POLITICIANSure...How was that?CATHERINEWhat you rob, you spend. And what you spend goes back to the people. So where's the robbery? I read that in one of my father's books.THE POLITICIANThat book should be in every home!

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Maybe what this is. What we have, is something that will save us from ourselves.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

Could thou not make those that have been made, and be now, and that are for to come, at once; that thou might shew thy judgement the sooner?

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

Remember, we all make our work available in a commercial transaction, the terms of which we, ourselves, dictate. If we give it away for free, that’s our decision, and there is no refuge in the lame defense, “what do you want for nothing?” The buyer does not waive his right to express his opi

You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

Yes, writing is that easy. Yes, writing is that hard. But if you want to do it you can. Only you can stop you.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

Identifying as a writer is a matter of self-acceptance. It's not a thing that can be given to you, or bestowed upon you. You are a writer if you write. That's it. If what you are seeking is to be acknowledged as a writer by other people, many of them strangers, you're in for a demoralizing journey. It is a silly club where those who have been 'accepted' are loathe to permit others into. It's sort of like how we Americans love denying our own immigrant origins while railing against immigration.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Copywriting is a design muse, it carves a beautiful masterpiece in an imaginative way.

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

There's a kid or some kids somewhere. I'll never know them. They're particle-puzzle-cubing right now. They might be mini-misanthropes from Moosefart, Montana. They might be demi-dystopians from Dogdick, Delaware. They dig my demonic dramas. The metaphysic maims them. They grasp the gravity. They'll duke it out with their demons. They'll serve a surfeit of survival skills. They won't be chronologically crucified.They'll shore up my shit. They'll radically revise it. They'll pass it along.

I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

You must begin writing your life book.

Fiction in general holds little interest for me. Novels, in particular, arouse more suspicion than intrigue. It truly baffles me that any practitioner of make-believe should (especially in this day and age) feel the need to produce anything so gratuitous. The fact that certain examples of this fare can approach the length of your average dictionary seems inherently absurd.

The sisterhood of librarians is a non-profit organisation and our goal is to keep imagination alive, not make money.

Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat—chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.

I love to read.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Create a guidebook of creative dreamsYou can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others.

Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Hold on, and dont put us on hold

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

You should be more carefulwhen you move, my dearwhat with you...spilling moonlightinto my poem, with a mereflick of your hand.

Writers are influenced by their upbringing and experiences. But they are also influenced by the writings of others, the major historical events of their times and the great public and literary figures to whom they are exposed.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

If someone doesn't understand the importance of sensitivity readers, chances are they may need them the most...

I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don’t think, when I’m writing, “Tell a good story” or “find a meaning.” I’m thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get the idea out in language I can bear. I think there’s something musical about being impatient with boring sentences—it’s not that I don’t have boring sentences, God knows I do, but I’m impatient with them.

Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.

Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

End with an image and don't explain.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Without writers, stories would not be written,Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.

Goals are dreams with a deadline.