Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

Women govern us; let us render them perfect: the more they are enlightened, so much the more shall we be. On the cultivation of the mind of women depends the wisdom of men. It is by women that nature writes on the hearts of men.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

Wonder is very important, because if we never wondered, we would never get to the point of asking questions. Yet wonder may lead people to write poetry or to paint pictures or to pray, as well as to ask the kinds of questions about the world and themselves that can be answered by science.

Won't it be sad to have an Internet connection to Mars if there are no Martians to write to or e-mail us?

Word meanings are like stretchy pullovers, whose outline contour is visible, but whose detailed shape varies with use.

Words are changing. I find that old expressions are outdated, so when I write something, I try to find a new expression that hasn't been born yet. It's difficult.

Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

...words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see-thoughtfully.

Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care.

Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.

Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions, or delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit to other things.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.

Words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles you read page after page without noticing the medium. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

Work at your craft, write daily, and follow your dreams because dreams do come true.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

Words, words, words, a million million words circle in my head like hawks, waiting to dive onto the page to rend and tear the only two words I want to write. Why me?

Work ethic is one of the biggest things my father taught me. That man worked like every day, every day, 9 to 5, well 9 to 9 in his case, but he would treat it as if it was a 9 to 5 job. He would clock in. He would put in his hours. That is how you can write those you know incredibly long books that unfortunately there is not much market for anymore, but that is also how you can explore an idea on a deeper level than we get in our media surface these days. It's tough.

Work extra hard on the beginning of your story, so it snares reader's instantly. And know how you're going to end your story before you start writing. Without a sense of direction, you can get lost in the middle.

Working with artists and other poets has made me aware that there was a bigger "me" that I hadn't been quite aware of. Plus we had a good time. It's so much fun to write, for example, with a big brush on a giant piece of paper and to help create visually attractive and surprising objects, which is not what you normally do when you're writing a poem. It's wonderful to create these pieces with artists.

Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer.

Working with people you adore and love. There's just a sense, all the way through all of the movies [Planet of Apes], that you're very rarely in a position where you have great material that you're passionate about and a big audience who love it, and the detail and nuance, and the exquisiteness of the fantastic actors and director with great writing.

Working on Drive, a lot of fun. This is Tim Minear whom I've worked with before on Firefly of course. He called me up and said I've got a part for you that you will love and I love Tim's writing. I love his stories. I love his characters, his dialogue. He has a knack for reveals and he has a knack for moments.

Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.

Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your nerves.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

Work. Write. Read. Keep putting words on the page, because that's the only way you'll get better.