Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

It's hard work to retain a childlike curiosity in the familiar

It's impossible to be a good writer if you haven't lived badly.

It's impossible to be a good writer if you haven't lived badly. A past life of drinking heavily, fighting and whoring all help to ease those words onto the page.

It’s incredible how small the English language gets when you’re trying to make it fix something.

It's in my head now. It's a memory. No camera could have captured what I saw and felt.

It's in my blood, as magic is in yours." His mouth is still smiling, but his tone is somber. "I couldn't stop writing even if I wanted to.

It's just not as hot without biting, scratching, and spanking, involved.

It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine." (on Tom Wolfe)

It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention.

It's no good writing if God hasn't given you talent. People will just laugh.

It’s no secret that I use the Goodreads blog to talk about writing which makes this space a lab, of sorts, and myself the subject.

It's not always about writing more words or drinking more coffee. Sometimes getting to the end of a novel simply takes remembering that the world is more complicated than we know, and then sticking some of those complications into the story.

It's not a job but a condition. (Alan Garner on writing)

It's not about how many words you write, but how good those words are.

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

It’s not about the typo, it’s about the message.

It's not a silly pursuit to read beyond what's handed to you, to seek out new voices and leap over the usual books everyone's already talking about and see what you can find on your own. Making definitive choices about what we spend our time on as readers can make a statement, a difference. We can lift other writers up, give space and attention to more voices than the ones that already have all the space and attention. There is power in what we choose to consume as readers, and there is power in what we choose to amplify, celebrate, and share.

It's not how great the ideas are. It's about how you write them, to make them great.

It’s not the destination (of seeking the truth) that creates our dignity or integrity, it’s the journey. From Messages From a Grandfather, by Robert Gately

It’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s the fear of not writing well; something quite different.

It's not just a novel idea, it's a novel.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't quite be able to quit.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

It’s not what’s happened or what’s about to happen; what’s important is the sense of emotional uncertainty between the characters and the delicacy of the mutual trust being established.

It's okay darling, creative people are called crazy all the time.

It's okay to be crazy as long as you keep writing and are happy.

It's not what you did, but what you didn't do that spoke to me above the wind

It's okay, Ms Rainn, you were simply lost in your imagination.

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

It's quite simple. I just don't feel right without a pen in my hand denting a hole through my notepad.

It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.

Its pretty annoying to real writers, when some unqualified, talent-free hack calls himself a writer, because it devalues the word. Millions of shitty self-published wannabe writers are giving real indie writers with real talent a bad name.

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

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.

It's still strange.

It’s the spotlight that bothers him. Isaac left the concrete for the darkness. Where he could look into his life and learn. And Miles is promising to put a spotlight on that darkness. And bring back the gaze of the world that chased him there.

it’s the way he uses language—which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There’s no sense of nostalgia. There’s no medieval floridness. There’s no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It’s very straight, and very clean—there’s no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details.

Its weird how i dream things that are worth writing.Its like God is writing them into my mind while i am sleeping and the moment i woke up i know i have to write what i dreamt

It’s when your plans look dead that God’s resurrection power begins to operate in your life in greater measure

It's when you feel worse, that's when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit.

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period. Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma...

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

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

It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of sand that I didn't know was there and didn't particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can't help becoming obsessed with the pearl.

It was nice meeting you three, and I'm sure under different circumstances it would have been a pleasure.

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart. Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master Molière. He had high ambitions and scorned what I wrote as frivolous and feminine. ‘All these disguises and duels and abductions,’ he said contemptuously, one day a year or so after our affair began, slapping down the pile of paper covered with my sprawling handwriting. ‘All these desperate love affairs. And you wish me to take you seriously.’ ‘I like disguises and duels.’ I sat bolt upright on the edge of my bed. ‘Better than those dreary boring plays you write. At least something happens in my stories.’ ‘At least my plays are about something.’ ‘My stories are about something too. Just because they aren’t boring doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy.’ ‘What are they about? Love’ He clasped his hands together near his ear and fluttered his eyelashes.’ ‘Yes, love. What’s wrong with writing about love? Everyone longs for love.’ ‘Aren’t there enough love stories in the world without adding to them? ‘Isn’t there enough misery and tragedy?’ Michael snorted with contempt. ‘What’s wrong with wanting to be happy? ‘It’s sugary and sentimental.’ ‘Sugary? I’m not sugary.’ I was so angry that I hurled my shoes at his head.

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't be careful enough.