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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
cabc771 Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late. writing music self-referential David Mitchell
b2842f3 I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. writing Seamus Heaney
66460b3 It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged. writing tools Stephen King
9135530 Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth worth writing L.M. Montgomery
7d50422 One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other. writing the-other Charles Simic
1160079 "You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary -- it's always imaginary -- world in which I would like to live. writing imagination William S. Burroughs
403324e A Gift for You I send you... A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond. You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time. writing dreaming procrastination creativity Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)
c4b1d85 I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. television reading writing pride thought Stephen King
b17a952 The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds writing wisdom art-criticism music-criticism music-journalism critics knowledge writers insight Nassim Nicholas Taleb
e74c358 I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life. writing writers Stephen King
68a94af It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo. writing novels P.G. Wodehouse
57bcd1a The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure. writer writing passivity Anaïs Nin
315fabb Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage. poetry writing Pat Conroy
6b1be0d "Don't dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a "stint," [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that "stint" each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year. Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don't wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself. See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all. Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory. And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well. The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth--SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants." [ writing Jack London
0e7c9aa I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end. writing Paul Auster
a6f8360 I myself grew up to be not only a Hero, but also a Writer. When I was an adult, I rewrote , and I included not only some descriptions of the various deadly dragon species, and a useful Dragonese Dictionary, but also this story of how the book came to be written in the first place. This is the book that you are holding in your hands right now. Perhaps you even borrowed it from a Library? If so, thank Thor that the sinister figure of the Hairy Scary Librarian is not lurking around a corner, hiding in the shadows, Heart-Slicers at the ready, or that the punishment for your curiosity is not the whirring whine of a Driller Dragon's drill. You, dear reader, I am sure cannot what it might to be like to live in a world in which books are banned. For surely such things will never happen in the Future? Thank Thor that you live in a time and a place where people have the right to live and think and write and read their books in peace, and there are no need for Heroes anymore ... And spare a thought for those who have not been so lucky. reading writing books Cressida Cowell
3482a1e The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts. writing envy creativity Steven Pressfield
3877393 To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution. writing inspiration sociology creativity Steven Pressfield
077f9a2 The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. writing inspiration art Steven Pressfield
c3e2357 I felt like poisoning a monk. writing Umberto Eco
51a34de The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. individuality writing identity life Neil Gaiman
55a1deb "To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler." writing humor punctuation Lynne Truss
f34f0e8 Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words. writing learning-by-doing P.D. James
f792b57 "Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't." writing J.R. Ward
fa90452 This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too? writing inspirational explode Ray Bradbury
57bcb4c Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself. writing Ann Patchett
0a80fc2 I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate. writing Natalie Goldberg
46bc524 All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. writing stories Margaret Atwood
f613cc5 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 writing inspirational Ernest Hemingway
007bcdf But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world. writing teaching Umberto Eco
c137c1c The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. writing motivation Steven Pressfield
5c50322 We're all pros already. 1) We show up every day 2) We show up no matter what 3) We stay on the job all day 4) We are committed over the long haul 5) The stakes for us are high and real 6) We accept remuneration for our labor 7) We do not overidentify with our jobs 8 ) We master the technique of our jobs 9) We have a sense of humor about our jobs 10) We receive praise or blame in the real world writing work professional Steven Pressfield
8880343 Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest. story writing plot Stephen King
9253092 "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." writing thought short-stories Raymond Carver
81204a6 "Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery." writing on-fiction Joyce Carol Oates
65a4bed The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. writing Oscar Wilde
146291c Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him. suicide suffering poem poetry writing love blocks brooklyn artists-life bridge creativity Henry Miller
17dc5cb One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. writing colour Virginia Woolf
3cb0444 I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it. writing storytelling jungle Edgar Rice Burroughs
ecb279e It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. writer writing Charles Dickens
4b4bfa3 The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. feminism writing tell-your-own-story Rebecca Solnit
48e56bc If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever. writing Jodi Picoult
66b4774 No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. writing truth authorship Arthur Schopenhauer
840eb37 All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone. writing drafting writers-block psychology Erica Jong
b4e7139 You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. writing John Fowles
58c11d8 An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again. writing Ruth Ozeki
a478aad The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. writing writers Julian Barnes
9bf6792 Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbelief? If the latter, you haven't friends. Go find some. writing Ray Bradbury
bc7e5a1 "Next morning I went over to Paul's for coffee and told him I had finished. "Good for you," he said without looking up. "Start the next one today." writing writing-advice Steven Pressfield
153998b "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. writing John Steinbeck
f96d317 Writing is one method of dealing with being human or wanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at the same time while remaining alive. suicide words writing language Kathy Acker
25f4435 Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods. shakespeare writing writers Ray Bradbury
43469cc The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them writing Douglas Adams
ffdb8f0 The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. writing weird-tales H.P. Lovecraft
10ea348 In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood. writing G.K. Chesterton
9ca8c97 As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too. writing Cornelia Funke
de740e3 No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read. writing David McCullough
6aa8e03 Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin. writing love Natalie Goldberg
933f25c Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!) writing humor Nick Hornby
b9b3f3a It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does. writing Eric Hobsbawm
aa9c89e not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. writing Thomas Jefferson
979bab6 And why is it all men think everything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain silly drivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of finding the perfect love? romantic romance writing love romantic-notions finding-love V.C. Andrews
73a2544 Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion writing Dan Simmons
5c47124 "How do I know you're not crazy?" she asks. "How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met?" "You'll have to test me out." "You have my info," she says. "I'll think about it." "Rain," I say. "That's not your real name." "Does it matter?" "Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real." "That's because you're a writer," she says. "That's because you make things up for a living." "And?" "And"-- she shrugs--"I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that." sanity lies writing reality truth socializing Bret Easton Ellis
0daddae They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets. writing novelists Philip K. Dick
4769a26 Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. writing truth self-revelation revelation secrets Michael Chabon
95cde29 Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward writing tips J.R. Ward
d48c653 When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation? Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute? time writing death life charles-dickens regret writers old-age Dan Simmons
10cf827 Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul. writing walter-pater prose style soul Oscar Wilde
f53b2bd The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture. understanding people writing painting sculpture Louis L'Amour
f247fa3 I've never trusted collaborations, because most people in this world are not closers. They don't finish what they start; they don't live what they dream; they sabotage their own progress because they're afraid they won't find what they seek. writing success Neil Strauss
d50868e Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself. writer writing muses paper pen Anne Fadiman
20cb403 A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. writing Virginia Woolf
33b2cb4 The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her. motherhood writing Steven Pressfield
d9df51a USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it. writing Zadie Smith
d1e7fde ...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge? writing knowledge Lloyd Alexander
5e2a1ec I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne. writing characters villians L.M. Montgomery
8a0ae11 "A writer or any artist can't expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it's your calling. But it's beautiful to be embraced by the people. Some people have said to me, "Well, don't you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you're a punk rocker, you don't want to have a hit record..." And I say to them, "Fuck you!" writing art creativity Patti Smith
9ab3209 "Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream." reading writing dreams english David Mitchell
9df62ca In a way, I was safe writing writing way Franz Kafka
5391e1e She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind. mind writing john-galt Ayn Rand
4405039 "Do not start me on writing the-davinci-code novels literary-criticism Salman Rushdie
c431345 Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress... Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! writing work humor Nick Hornby
0b6eab7 If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that. writing readers writers Julian Barnes
8359502 Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all. writing Neil Gaiman
cecd3d8 In Irena's head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears. sex personality drinking poetry writing love forgetting forget poet Milan Kundera
fee258e And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do! words writing David Almond
2eeea06 It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. writing-life writing write writing-process Steven Pressfield
b6301ed When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become , that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it. reading writing books books-and-authors books-and-reading published-books publishing metamorphosis perception Salman Rushdie
ee05a8a Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. perfection writing inspirational Anne Lamott
3d82ae4 It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes. writing Ray Bradbury
b0f8149 "The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising." [ exercise writing imagination revision failure Stephen King
8190f7f Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right. writing innocence Anne Lamott
52ffd5e "I often said that writers are of two types. There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint. writing creative-writing gardner authors writers George R.R. Martin
4a840e5 There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. And there is another personal satisfaction: that of the people who like to recount their adventures, the diary-keepers, the story-tellers, the letter-writers, a strange race of people who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold. It does not really exist until it is put into words. As though a little doubting or dull, they could not see it until it is repeated. For, paradoxically enough, the more unreal an experience becomes - translated from real action into unreal words, dead symbols for life itself - the more vivid it grows. Not only does it seem more vivid, but its essential core becomes clearer. One says excitedly to an audience, 'Do you see - I can't tell you how strange it was - we all of us felt...' although actually, at the time of incident, one was not conscious of such a feeling, and only became so in the retelling. It is as inexplicable as looking all afternoon at a gray stone of a beach, and not realizing, until one tries to put it on canvas, that is in reality bright blue. time writing meaning feeling journals stories Anne Morrow Lindbergh
196e747 It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone. writing writing-process Zadie Smith
9d7f959 I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume. writing lobster Elizabeth Gilbert
8adf337 I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood. understanding writing work walking Ernest Hemingway
5c6597b All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. writing truth thought Anne Brontë
b67317c I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. humour writing wooster jeeves-and-wooster jeeves wodehouse writing-craft P.G. Wodehouse
74d39d9 The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. writing Joan Didion
cf3ccd9 If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent. writing empowerment determination energy devotion creative-process talent Honoré de Balzac
fd83ea6 "It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don't have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It's a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: "So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it's also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun... The most evil trick about perfectionism, though, is that it disguises itself as a virtue." writing perfectionism Elizabeth Gilbert
ca8cc1e James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation. writing literary ideas T.S. Eliot
fa35048 She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it. writing writing-advice Jeffrey Eugenides
a7d7518 Hard writing makes easy reading. writing Wallace Stegner
3875ef4 Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. writing resilience diligence talent discipline creativity Glen Cook
6dadc80 I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems. writing David Almond
16913f0 To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small. words reading writing Paul Auster
190abff Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. writing writers Julian Barnes
805d64c Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the worlds are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. words writing advice on-writing language Raymond Carver
1c6eb71 Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out. writing opening-up expansion E.M. Forster
9cd9db2 "The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?" And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: " writing confluence creative-process ideas Neil Gaiman
b3b8348 "A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don't usually remember my dreams.) I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was-green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting. I said, in wonder, "Is this Heaven?" The recording angel said, "It is." I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), "But there must be a mistake. I don't belong here. I'm an atheist." "No mistake," said the recording angel. "But as an atheist how can I qualify?" The recording angel said sternly, "We decide who qualifies. Not you." "I see," I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, "Is there a typewriter here that I can use?" The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this." heaven writing Isaac Asimov
f71452c Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? memories writing memory nostalgia Haruki Murakami
b3a85e1 That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing. writing Haruki Murakami
bd67998 In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it. writing motivation Tobias Wolff
2596845 "I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice")" writing Richard Matheson
16ac8fd I think talent is like a water table under the earth--you tap it with your effort and it comes through you. writing Natalie Goldberg
90b22b6 lktb@ mthl lsh`wdh@ : lykfy khrj 'rnb mn lqb`@ , bl yjb `ml dhlk b'nq@ wTryq@ mmt`@ writing Isabel Allende
450db90 It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look. writing inspirational Jeanette Winterson
81b9cc8 She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls' hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to. rape freedom writing pen girl teen incest Cynthia Voigt
74aa30f The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. words writing life speech Don DeLillo
566eb71 The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration. writing inspiration motivation Steven Pressfield
ef2399f "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." [ ; November 16, 1857]" writing precision storytelling Henry David Thoreau
86472dd There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list. writing reasons craft why readers writers Umberto Eco
ef8a1ee A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind! writing reality Joseph Conrad
f8dcffa She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins. writing inspirational Tom Robbins
79c8c70 How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print? poetry writing Sylvia Plath
c132b7a "The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right . I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them." writing plot creative-process storytelling P.G. Wodehouse
7b2142d Literature represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control. literature writing Robert Bringhurst
8e7914c The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. words literature reading writing Marcel Proust
14c44b5 We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge. writing Flannery O'Connor
8bd80b6 Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza. writing companionship Nicholas Tucker
91e4357 Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit. writing genre Alberto Manguel
defa418 As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory. writing satire David Mitchell
e66e3cc "What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!" writing Ray Bradbury
8e8b374 We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom. writing life-experience Ray Bradbury
b1498a7 Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91) love-story shakespeare romance writing L.M. Montgomery
3c21108 This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. writing Ernest Hemingway
05e63be We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add -- until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. writing Annie Dillard
d4cd5ee poems are small moments of enlightenment poetry writing poetry-life writing-craft poetry-quotes poet Natalie Goldberg
8740c29 "Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can." writing-life writer writing anne-lamott first-draft first-drafts bird-by-bird writing-advice write writers Anne Lamott
e5394c4 Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world. writing Chinua Achebe
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