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63e64df I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me. writing writers-on-writing Hunter S. Thompson
e02f0c6 In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book. writing inspirational writers-on-writing writers Junot Diaz
62d54c2 Ink, a Drug. writing ink writers-on-writing Vladimir Nabokov
dbc0272 Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. writing-from-the-heart writers-on-writing writing-philosophy writing-advice Stephen King
014d9c9 "I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how to become a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite education writers-on-writing hurt Kurt Vonnegut
368bd24 Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. writing writer-s-block writers-on-writing E.L. Doctorow
891e95d "Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust. -- from "A Voice" travel reading writing writers-on-writing writers Barry Lopez
fcf4067 Far and away the greatest menace to the writer--any writer, beginning or otherwise--is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or--kindest of all--goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind. reading writing writers-on-writing Shirley Jackson
2aeef19 He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true. writing ulysess writers-on-writing Kate DiCamillo
c8f15e7 "There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men." writers-on-writing scientists John Steinbeck
fee0a2d Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting--that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art--and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort. writing-life writer joy writing life inspirational writers-on-writing book painting strangers curiosity creativity Yann Martel
3df2589 The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater. writer writing christian-writers novelist realistic-fiction writers-on-writing perspective perception perception-of-reality realism Flannery O'Connor
d79139e ...if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal; writing writing-a-book writers-on-writing James M. Cain
16d7f6d Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete. writing writing-style writers-on-writing Flannery O'Connor
2632e8b "I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it. But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me--such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars." writing how-to-write how-to-write-fiction writing-skills writing-class writing-talent writing-fiction writing-books writers-on-writing technique writing-process talent writers Flannery O'Connor
31d72a8 Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched. writing how-to-write-fiction writing-quotes writers-on-writing novel writers Flannery O'Connor
c74c1df "Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve -- hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve -- not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us. writing reason why-writers-write writers-on-writing why writers Joy Williams
a5d3ffe 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. writing writers-block writers-on-writing Sam Shepard
863baf3 "It kept coming back to joy-- how could I live a life filled with it? And always, the answer that came back to me was "Write." ... I am here because of the indigenous people of this country, because of the enslaved people who were here before me, the young people of the civil rights movements who fought hard to get me to this moment. My biggest responsibility is to recognize that I am part of the continuum, that I didn't just appear and start writing stuff down. I'm writing stuff down because Andre Lorde wrote stuff down, because James Baldwin wrote stuff down... and all the people who came before me -- set the stage for my work. I have to keep all of that in my heart as I move through the world, not only for the deep respect I have for them, but also for my own strength. So my advice to other young writers: Read widely. Study other writers. Be thoughtful, Then go out and do the work of changing the form, finding your own voice, and saying what you need to say. Be fearless. And care. The fact that young people continue to rise brings me such joy. They are where I look to find my hope. -- "Continue to Rise: A Conversation with Jacqueline Woodson" identity writers-on-writing Glory Edim
28c11c8 It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much. writing writing-fiction writing-style writers-on-writing Flannery O'Connor
f79dd82 "There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful--the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliche, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel. Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself." writing-life writing fiction-writers lonely-writer novelists-life writing-mindset writing-myths novelist writers-on-writing writing-process Flannery O'Connor
7683bdb Mi vida estuvo siempre perturbada por una marana de trampas, gambetas e ilusiones para burlar los incontables senuelos que trataban de convertirme en cualquier cosa que no fuera escritor. inspirational writers-life writers-on-writing Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
40aa0c2 We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves. writing writers-on-writing self-discovery writers Jane Yolen
fc689b1 I think you are talented an passionate, Isabella. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step toward achieving anything in life. Natural talent is like an athlete's strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she is born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes an athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation, and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon. writer writers-on-writing Carlos Ruiz Zafón
6b32db9 Art consist of a writer or painter's psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel 'Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969). writing memoir-writing writers-voice writing-style essayist writers-on-writing writing-philosophy writers-quotes writing-process Kilroy J. Oldster
ab4dbcf I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different. writers-on-reading writers-life writers-on-writing writers-quotes Richard Wright
9769073 "In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff's characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: "It's a thing you don't talk about--not until you're well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start." writers-on-writing David W. Wixon
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