Writing Quotes - Page 94

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential.

‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

You are alone. But you seems not afraid- though you weary with your groaning; wandering far off in the wilderness and your eyes, consumed because of your grief; waxed old while you're still young.

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.

As a boy, reading was my religion. It helped me to discover my soul. Later, writing helped me to record its journey.

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]

Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates.

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.

Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.

To write freely is to walk a joyous, terrifying, exhilarating path naked through the world of the fully clothed.

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

You say great artists sell their souls for their art?""Maybe," she ventured."That's true, I suppose. If you're doing it right, anyway. I've probably sold mine. Jack's certainly sold his. And you, I imagine.""I have not!" she said, anger showing clear in her eyes. "Not literally," he said hastily. "But we give up being a person to be an artist, don't we?

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

I've had to keep defining and defending myself as a writer every single day of my adult life -- constantly reminding and re-reminding my soul and the cosmos that I'm very serious about the business of creative living, and that I will never stop creating, no matter what the outcome, and no matter how deep my anxieties and insecurities may be.

I tried to think outside the box but couldn't open the lid.

[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

His shout was a syllable so ancient and powerful that Saffiyah's mind instantly censored it.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

The story we write today will support the next generation.

I started writing to make sense of the world that exists inside my heart

If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.

I would rather have a man chasing JESUS than a house full of stuffs and garrage filled with big cars.

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.

I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

Walk into the unknown with what you know in your heart.

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

Just know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

Words are a means to an end. Those who chase after them inevitably fail to reach that end.

I write to understand what I know.

i am infinitely yearningbrimmingand overflowingin wordsi discoverit’s another wayfor meto be in tears.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

I am a huge believer in revelations and fun twists.

Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.

If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.

The desire to write grows with writing.

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.

What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.

All worries are less with wine.