Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.

a writer doesn't only need the time when he's actually writing - he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.

A writer works from the material she has, but it comes from the unconscious. Everything is stored up and one never knows what comes up to the surface at a given moment. A period of gestation is certainly needed, what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquility.’ You cannot write about an experience when you are living it, suffering it. You are too busy surviving to look at it objectively. At least I can’t.

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

A writer who can't write in a grammerly manner better shut up shop.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.

A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?

A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

A writer arrived at the monastery to write a book about the Master. "People say you are a genius . Are you?" he asked. "You might say so." said the Master, none too modestly. "And what makes one a genius?" "The ability to recognize." "Recognize what?" "The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.

A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country.

A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.

A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.