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3b6862d Filled with existential ennui about your place in the universe? Get over yourself. Yes, you're an inconsequential worm in the grand scope of history. But you're an inconsequential worm who makes shit up for a living, which means that you don't have to lift heavy boxes or ask people if they want fries with that. Grow up and get back to work. writing work life John Scalzi
c527101 My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. writing kafka novel Jonathan Franzen
45b02e1 On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges. sleep writing inspirational thought-provoking Tom Robbins
4f4a0c7 One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards. Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it. A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer. writing living James Salter
a9f0b0c Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications. writing Manuel Rivas
5ea28d9 I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time. writing novels novelists writers Sue Monk Kidd
9505d72 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. writing Ann Patchett
df60ecc The first duty of an Author is --- I conceive --- a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities. --- Charlotte Bronte nature writing truth Juliet Barker
46e790b Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed. But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another. Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others. But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire. writing Margaret Atwood
78dbdb7 Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn't easy, but it's fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world. writing writing-process Guy Kawasaki
a22a46a When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come upon darkness, you'll know it has dimension. You'll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling windows and empty refrigerator - to your meager livelihood, which demands, inevitably, that you write about it. story writing Elizabeth J. Andrew
6b1e5ff "You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him." writing Markus Zusak
f6477b4 I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail. writing inspirational Leon Uris
b97d61b A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. writing Anne Lamott
0274f43 Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel. fiction writing novels Eudora Welty
844e0df Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she'd written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time. writing inspirational Lisa Scottoline
9c1e41e Human life is fiction's only theme. fiction writing Eudora Welty
e17e777 Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details. writing natalie-goldberg Natalie Goldberg
6ee6a8e A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on. writing Marcel Proust
fbf888a Fragments are the only forms I trust. writing trust truth form Donald Barthelme
8fa4bf7 Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. writing Donald Barthelme
6abc35e I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry? writing work Graham Greene
e59e7b2 Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it maybe that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process. writing Francine Prose
8f0d876 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. writing creative-process Elizabeth Gilbert
c03c05b (2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost. writing bridges wandering cities Nick Flynn
1d8ff60 I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to. reading writing creativity Eudora Welty
59d34e1 A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt. writing inspirational novel Leon Uris
ec47c18 "Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive, and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties. Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard. Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even when he fails he appreciates their inner majesty. They are gateways to employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on King Lear may lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often put it to himself openly and say, "That's the use of knowing things, they help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely real one. ...As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider." writing market employment falsehood jobs scholarship college economics faculty exams university E.M. Forster
f931067 Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope--and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing--that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that...' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already. It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so. writing books authorship book-reviews collaboration essays readers writers Christopher Hitchens
1d9d350 The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful pain relationships writing reality family-contact Monica Ali
59b735c Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up , for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea. writing Nassim Nicholas Taleb
0052850 Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination. reading writing Eudora Welty
5107e68 I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler. writing raymond-chandler Julian Barnes
5e21636 I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. writing Roald Dahl
e2cf7c2 I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. words reading writing Robert Louis Stevenson
a156caf The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers. writing satire teaching David Sedaris
5f77319 Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner. travel reading writing friends Christopher Hitchens
13d5ddc In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. writing Marcel Proust
cb01293 In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207) words literature writing engineering simplicity Alain de Botton
db0c7ec He began to write his thoughts and observations concerning the day's events [...] It helped him better understand everything he had seen and done over the course of the day. understanding writing journal Christopher Paolini
4e9935f Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps. words writing uncertainty Christopher Hitchens
26942d0 I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea. writing vietnamese Monique Truong
f5912f1 ymkn lwrq@ 'w rysh@ 'n tjtrH l`jy'b , ftshtfy lalm , wtHqq l'Hlm w t`yd l'ml lmfqwd pain writing Paulo Coelho
80914ca Writing ... is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy. writing John Updike
5a8b184 You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing -- grinding, buffing, and polishing -- not writing. writing Guy Kawasaki
02b1556 As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? writing character possibility Milan Kundera
2391bf2 I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened. writing Alison Bechdel
66e3431 Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. writing imagination heartbreak trade-in disappointment writers Ann Patchett
76d8bc3 Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore -- since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now -- there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done... Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk... She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love -- as the male novelists define it -- and who, after all, speak with greater authority? -- has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and -- But we all know what love is... If then, the subject of one's biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her. writing d h-lawrence intellectualism sexism Virginia Woolf
c139396 Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion. writer writing e-b-white eb-white strunk-and-white strunk-white the-elements-of-style william-strunk-jr author authors writing-advice write William Strunk Jr.
152ae51 [W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness. writing conviction experience Flannery O'Connor
712bd1e Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left. writing usability webdesign Steve Krug
87c88e0 I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. writing books Sarah Vowell
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
5f95f2d The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. writing exposure improvement failures faults writers John Steinbeck
614f85e [Charlotte Bronte] once told her sisters that they were wrong - even morally wrong - in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, 'I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours. writing jane-eyre charlotte-bronte Elizabeth Gaskell
1df605c Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up. writing David Rakoff
4d5cfce Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form. writing editing Jack London
29c64d1 It was [John Gardner's] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. writing Raymond Carver
9b41b75 Be thankful for the people who have stood by you and cheered you on, but don't forget to be thankful for the ones that said it could not be done. Writing a book is no small task and even the skeptics can help you get where you want to be! writing motivation ck-webb supporters skeptics CK Webb
5816381 Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality. writing genre storytelling horror Peter Straub
39cd680 Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. literature poetry writing craft skill self-confidence A.S. Byatt
259b613 A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur--or APE. writing writing-process Guy Kawasaki
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
947615d When asked about rewriting, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that spontaneous eloquence seemed like a miracle and that he rewrote every word he ever published, and often several times. And Mark Strand, former poet laureate, says that each of his poems sometimes goes through forty to fifty drafts before it is finished. writing Susan M. Tiberghien
2e98040 "The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph. Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...." writing sports wit Hunter S. Thompson
ae0f821 I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature. reading writing science Nick Hornby
3ac7625 . . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets. writing Libba Bray
45ea848 I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write. poetry writing Francesca Lia Block
660caca "Writing is defined as "a conversation with no one and yet with everyone." writing Neil Postman
ba210ad After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock. writing Craig Ferguson
ed6c966 "God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. ("Mad House")" writing writers creativity Richard Matheson
8017096 "My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over." writing Stephen Jay Gould
38729dc Writing is a craft, being an author is work, and having readers and a following is a gift. writing work followers craft readers Michael J. Kannengieser
a2d7334 ...Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done--so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well. satisfaction writing work satisfaction-of-writing craft-of-writing improvement Ernest Hemingway
1cb6725 I argue that it is not Woolf's remoteness that puts people off but her nearness that terrifies them. Her language is not a woolly blanket it is a sharp sword. , which is the most difficult of her works, is a strong-honed edge through the cloudiness most of us call life. It is uncomfortable to have the thick padded stuff ripped away. There is no warm blanket to be had out of Virginia Woolf; there is wind and sun and you naked. It is not remoteness of feeling in Woolf, it is excess; the unbearable quiver of nerves and the heart pounding. It is exposure. And it is exactness. writing virginia-woolf Jeanette Winterson
98bee51 "I owe a huge debt to Anais Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of hero for someone like me, committed to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of my craft as well as to the technical ones, but a hero and strong influence she remains nonetheless. reading writing inspiring Terri Windling
9f628b9 I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. writing Ernest Hemingway
7b3d2a9 Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever. time history writing reality past change capture fade fled hold-on preserve write remember flower Robin Hobb
f966734 The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. fiction writing Bret Easton Ellis
4bfba5f I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-- that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender's Game) writing storytelling Orson Scott Card
ee246c7 "An editor doesn't just read, he reads , and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone ( = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book , Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good." In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves--this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it." reading writing editing revision freedom-of-thought thought writers Susan Bell
2a03eea "It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone." [ writing creative-process notes ideas memory Mary Oliver
f25d104 The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time. writing Eudora Welty
f34c139 Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive. writing Mary Stewart
e376956 This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet. reading writing books readers writers Rebecca Solnit
898f119 Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away poems poetry writing pins ennui pin sadism sadist pride Norman Mailer
8f7e6ee Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark. writing subject-matter generalizations ideas Wallace Stegner
ba4215d I love the word 'fantasy'... but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the imagination. I do not love it for the idea of commercial fantasy. Commercial fantasy, for good or for ill, tends to drag itself through already existing furrows, furrows dug by J. R. R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, leaving a world of stories behind it, excluding so much. There was so much fine fiction, fiction allowing free reign to the imagination of the author, beyond the shelves of genre. That was what we wanted to read. writing fantasy Neil Gaiman
24edb93 I wrote. Something. Yes. And you were truthful. No. You weren't truthful? I was accurate. writing truth Richard Flanagan
3bbdc15 Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility. writing books Katherine Paterson
17af801 Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow. writing Nicole Krauss
8f68dfb When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds. writing Sam Shepard
5f35595 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. reading writing inspiration ideas James Ellroy
bdb4dfd "While I have the floor, here's a question that's been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels . . . that so many of them take place in cultures that are rigid, hierarchical, stratified, and in essence oppressive? What is so appealing about feudalism, that so many free citizens of an educated commonwealth like ours love reading about and picturing life under hereditary lords? Why the deposed prince or princess in every cliched tale be chosen to lead the quest against the Dark Lord? Why not elect a new leader by merit, instead of clinging to the inbred scions of a failed royal line? Why not ask the pompous, patronizing, "good" wizard for something , such as flush toilets, movable type, or electricity for every home in the kingdom? Given half a chance, the sons and daughters of peasants would rather not grow up to be servants. It seems bizarre for modern folk to pine for a way of life our ancestors rightfully fought desperately to escape." writing feudalism David Brin
f83aef9 "One of my favourite things to do when I write is to bring a sense of wonder to a normal everyday setting... Yes, there are magical elements, but there are also very down-to-earth elements and often what shines through isn't the magic, but the lanterns that the characters light against the dark... If you substitute the words "fairy tale" or "myth" for "fantasy," the reason I use these elements in my own work is that they create resonances that illuminate solutions to the real world struggle without the need for an authorial voice to point them out. Magic never solves the problems-we have to do that on our own-but in fiction it allows the dialogue to have a much more organic approach than the talking heads one can encounter in fiction that doesn't utilize the same tools. fairy-tales myth magic writing fantasy Charles de Lint
0aa5422 The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive. writing novelist Eudora Welty
ecbaf15 Tomorrow is no hazardous affair, a day like any other day: tomorrow is the result of many yesterdays and comes with a potent, cumulative effect. I am tomorrow what I chose to be yesterday and the day before. It is not possible that tomorrow I may negate and nullify everything that led me to this present moment. writing inspirational Henry Miller
462d850 Many people are partial to the notion that . . . all writers are somehow mere vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose. That we are not really in This is a variation on that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and 'take over a book.' This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen. writing writers Paul Collins
5b28d60 "Q: What's the biggest myth about writing? A: That there's any wildness attached to it. Writing tends to be very deliberate." [ writing deliberation precision urban-myths myths deliberate-creation Colm Tóibín
5b1ada1 All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. writing asian-american vietnamese wine Monique Truong
97bc351 You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth. reading writing pop-culture pulp-fiction stories Mike Carey & Peter Gross
398cc17 "I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head." writer writing authoring authors write on-writing writers Anne Lamott
b091499 The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that at any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened The Fraud Police. In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don't know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. writing funny inspiration fraud-police make-good-art creative-writing neil-gaiman Neil Gaiman
9ff1f38 "1. Write. 2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. 3. Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. 4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is. 5. Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. 6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving. 7. Laugh at your own jokes. 8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter." [ writing Neil Gaiman
49a195f I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story. story writing nonfiction Tobias Wolff
06a3562 The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it? writing writers Julian Barnes
0f7ece7 I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men and women alike--could go on to happier, more productive lives. writing Richard Ford
f30c4a4 "Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. writing worldbuilding science-fiction M. John Harrison
d4c5966 Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can. writing M. John Harrison
e91ade3 Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. writing memory Annie Dillard
12d5235 In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm writing Gustave Flaubert
193d05b Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly. writing craft novels Colm Tóibín
8f8a391 Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person...Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process. writing Elizabeth Gilbert
a53e29a There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private. silence writing beauty disclusure privicy private voice Terry Tempest Williams
a3433b7 I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living ...) writing novel Doris Lessing
46ef042 This was the sort of ebullience and elan I prayed for when I felt the desire to write. I used to sit down and wait for this to happen. But it never did happen- not this way. It happened afterwards, sometimes when I had left the machine and gone for a walk. Yes, suddenly it would come on, like an attack, pell-mell, from every direction, a veritable inundation, an avalanche- and there I was, helpless, miles away from the typewriter, not a piece of paper in my pocket. writing truth henry-miller sexus Henry Miller
de296bf No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose. writing Eudora Welty
46d0c26 The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite. writing paradox Fulton J. Sheen
698a07e We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most writing writers Eudora Welty
7381d48 "Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. -- Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library" -- creating library writing books writers Phillip Lopate
c6ede1d Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone. writing vocation Rebecca Solnit
fda5347 If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it. writing hamlet stories Thomas C. Foster
c4158d6 "Every phrase had to be captured on paper or it wasn't real, it slipped away. I'd see the words hanging in midair--Camille, pass the milk-- and anxiety coiled up in me as they began to fade, like jet exhaust. Writing them down, though, I had them. No worries that they'd become extinct. I was a lingual conservationist. I was the class freak, a tight, nervous eighth-grader frenziedly copying down phrases ("Mr. Feeney is totally gay," "Jamie Dobson is ugly," "They never have chocolate milk") with a keenness bordering on the religious." writing invisible-things Gillian Flynn
f8da987 Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. writing vitality Raymond Chandler
8dda2bd Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it. writing life Ray Bradbury
c65f5ff I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im. depression writing education society John Steinbeck
86a5dd9 "Maybe I can do some writing then. The phrase made him sick. It had no meaning anymore. Like a word that is repeated until it becomes gibberish that sentence, for him, had been used to extinction. It sounded silly; like some bit of cliche from a soap opera. Hero saying in dramatic tones - Now, by God, maybe I can do some writing. Senseless. For a moment, though, he wondered if it was true. Now that she was leaving could he forget about her and really get some work done? Quit his job? Go somewhere and hold up in a cheap furnished room and write? You have $123.89 in the bank, his mind informed him. He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.("Mad House")" writing Richard Matheson
c370780 "In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? ("Mad House")" writing Richard Matheson
36ef35c Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The abnormal effort that can be diverted or divided. We all know the story of Coleridge and the Man from Porlock. What of the woman writer and a whole family of Porlocks? For most of us the dilemma is rhetorical but those women who are driven with consummate energy through a single undeniable channel should be applauded and supported as vigorously as the men who have been setting themselves apart for centuries. women writing virginia-woolf Jeanette Winterson
0c94656 Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty. writing writing-philosophy novels Ralph Ellison
13774ee No black woman writer in this culture can write 'too much'. Indeed, no woman writer can write 'too much'...No woman has ever written enough writing women-writers Bell Hooks
7a685b9 She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara) writing toni-cade-bambara pleasure Bell Hooks
885ea6e But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then--all the combinations made--they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures. writing inspiration life drawing perception Leo Tolstoy
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
5143ff1 You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. literature writing Jay McInerney
f24212e It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader. Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party. responsibility writing readership paradoxes detective-stories guilt Umberto Eco
957510e But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world was a centre and that centre was here. 'The world's a sphere, everyone,' I wanted to say. 'The centre of a sphere doesn't lie on its surface. Look up the word 'superficial', when you have a chance. passion writing sphere surfaces superficiality new-york-city Mohsin Hamid
4395674 Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. writing writers Flannery O'Connor
a7e20e7 Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it. lying lies writing writers Aljean Harmetz
5881f93 if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it. writing waiting Ernest Hemingway
c2db8ce What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire. words writing imagination Blake Crouch
2d21c7b I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and childern play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams. fiction writing Diane Setterfield
6de3c4f Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning. warning writing Margaret Atwood
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