Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

all the words all the poems know my warm, soft spots.

All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. That which is far off, exceeding deep, who can find it out?

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy.

All writers read, Ms Rainn. With dwindling amounts of books circulating imagination, the less writers of all mediums will be able to exercise their own imaginations.

All writing is rewriting.

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.

Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good.

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, that need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy.

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument

A love of writing is far greater than any word count.

A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.

A lot of people will ask me “Whats depression like?”. Its the same answer every time. “Its shitty...”. But you know whats its really like? Its like a bundle of dark clouds falling over your head, raining constantly. So your drenched. You cant function properly, you can’t do the things you love because your fingers slip and you mess up. Your clothes metaphorically are like your life, you try to change them, but they only stay dry for a few seconds, then its the same old story all over again. And no one, I repeat no one, wants to be near you. Your a wet, soaking, depressed and helpless kitten lost in depressions firm grip. Its like a stalker, it follows you. Everywhere you go, Its waiting for you. You can’t leave it. You can’t ignore it. Its always there. Thats what makes it so scary. You can never get away from it, unless, someone pushes those fiery and dark clouds away. If their willing to sacrifice everything just to make you happy. Even if that means taking those clouds upon themselves.

Also, when I write letters, I spend the next two days thinking about what I figured out in my letters.

Although my work is to grapple with words, I have no words with which to describe and explain this feeling. Perhaps I write stories to show that in life there are moments, emotions, and events that cannot be explained with words.

Although well played by Billy Zane, Cal in the screenplay is one of the weakest part of the design, and would have been a more effective rival if he were more seductive, a better match for Rose, real competition for Jack, and not such an obvious monster. Then it would have been a real contest, and not a one-sided match between the most attractive young man in the universe and a leering, abusive cad with a bag of money in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Always choose love over fear.

Always I’m trying to make something human but as if it hasn’t been made by a human.

Always let life be wild. Forever have life be interesting.

Always have class but always kick ass.

Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you

Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.

Always remember that your memoir is never about you. It's about your reader. At it's core, it's about that shared space where we all experience the timeless truths of what it means to be human.

Always write exactly what you’re feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work…make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it…just put your heart and soul into all that you do…then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel." -Nina Jean Slack

A man does not know the full depth of his thoughts till he picks up a pen and writes; Or till he picks up a bottle and drinks; Both have roughly the same amount of intoxicating influence; With the former, they sometimes come out refined; With the latter, they always come out unscripted; Pick your poison wisely, Spill your innards sparingly

A man has perished; his corpse is dust, and his people have passed from the land; it is a book which makes him remembered in the mouth of a speaker. More excellent is a [papyrus] roll than a built house, than a chapel in the west. It is better than an established villa, than a stela in a temple...

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.

A masterpiece does not unfurl its wings immediately. It takes time. It will fly when it is ready.

A man who wants time to read and write lets the grass grow long.

A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

A me non piacciono molto i libri che vai avanti perché vuoi vedere come va a finire. Mi piacciono quelli in cui, potendo, staresti lì, senza andare avanti. Quelli che sono un paesaggio, e non una strada. Per cui anche quando scrivo libri che sono strade (Seta, ad esempio, lo era) li scrivo come uno che costantemente si lascia distrarre dal paesaggio, e perde tempo per strada, e alla fine si siede sotto un albero e guarda quello che c'è intorno, e parte con la fantasia.

Amazing Stories Mag: What does your writing process look like? Ursula K. Le Guin: It looks like a woman sitting at a desk, or staring out a window, or cooking dinner, or waking up in the morning, or whatever. You know what a ground bass is in music? A theme that keeps going on underneath, no matter what else is happening on top of it? Writing is the ground bass of my existence.

Amber May | 4 comments Stories that make me cry Tale that give me wing to fly What lovely things, what beautiful words So carefully crafted to be as sharp as swords A book for the old, A book for the new And my darling a book of me,I wrote for you. I think I might turn this into a quote, if don't mind. For some unsuspecting reader to find.

A mystery reader, confronted with a large mass of sudden detail, is going to go—subconsciously, at least—”Aha! somewhere in all of this the writer has planted a Clue!”, and look for that; a reader trained exclusively in mainstream literary fiction is likely to say, “Aha! all this emphasis must point to something of Thematic Importance!”, but an experienced reader of science fiction is going to assume that he or she is meant to take all of those details and out of them construct a world. Which is why the writer of a science-fiction mystery with literary ambitions is trying to do a quadruple somersault off the trapeze without a net.

Anais Nin responds to the age-old question of why some people are compelled to write: We... write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Now, please read that one more time. But this time, substitute the word “live” for the word “write” and there you have it—the point that’s always been right there in front of our nose.

Anak-anak muda jaman sekarang itu lucu dan agak susah dimengerti. Mereka cukup bersemangat membuat berbagai macam proposal untuk kegiatan organisasi yang mereka ikuti. Tapi proposal hidup yang berisi visi dan strateginya meraih mimpi, justru lupa mereka buat sendiri.

An assembly is extra slow in taking actions.

An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.

An artist must be passionately in love with her art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.