Writing Quotes - Page 96

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.

I live entire lifetimes in my head. Sometimes simultaneously.

Productive writing begins from understanding the idea.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done. Most of it is not like fairy dust in the least.

Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again!

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

A writer’s uniqueness glows and transforms the heart and the soul of a reader.

Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.

Sometimes we don't know where we are going until we get there.

As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realised that both systems of survival were, however, fundamentally illusory. She wrote, she said, quoting Oscar Wilde because, 'Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality'.

To my words: There was once a wall between us. Now we walk together and greet the world.

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Conflict is much the same, injustice and inequality is nothing new to our generation only the contest has changed because not only that everyone has opinion but they also have an opportunity to voice it and that is a bit dangerous.

The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.

Glory of the world makes life meaningless. Glory of God fulfills it.

Writing is self-pleasure

Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them.

It tugged at his soul not to talk to other writers about his work. He loved the bank, keeping it secure and compliant with the laws and regulations. People assumed these things happened by magic. They did not. Hauer never talked about it outside the office. He didn't want to make the other writers uncomfortable. If he developed a reputation as someone who brought his work with him to writers conferences they would all turn away, to sip and swizzle their drinks without him.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

It is infinitely easier to experience an indescribable experience than to describe it.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal.

For some, vampires are still firmly in the 'evil, scary' column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part of their appeal lies in their versatility. Vampires can be the villain, the hero, and everything in between, all depending on the writer's whim. You'll also never hear me say that anyone is doing vampires 'wrong' because unless a real vampire stands up and sets the record straight, it's anyone's game as a far as defining them in fiction.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

You are not the writer. You are the story being told from The Writer.

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.

The statement ‘There is nothing more American than an Indian’ happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

The right art," cried the Master, "is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.

Write what you know.

Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.

If there is method here, it is hard to discern it. Let it be repeated: the use of capitals is a matter not or rules but of taste; but consistency is at least not a mark of bad taste.

I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there's a good chance you were not called.

The Sodomy sea shall cast out fish, and make a noise in the night, which many have not known: but they shall all hear the voice thereof.

Creativity without commercialism will result in unseen masterpieces by unknown painters.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

First and foremost, I am me. I'm real. I don't write to impress. I write to express.

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

If rejections were cash, I'd be rich

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Stretch your writing muscles. Maybe the sophisticated technique nagging at you is something you’re just naturally good at. How else will you know?

Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.

What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.

Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.