Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Having a set of writing tools helps when you get lost in your writing process. And we all get lost sometimes.

Having work published using a pseudonym is so refreshing, its like a witness protection for victims of cyberbullying!

Heartbreak and pain occurs when people love with their heart. It so happens that the heart is not the most vital organ in the body. So when it is 'broken', the body still functions as normal, leaving you alive, but hollow. Next time, love with your brain. So when your lover decides to deceive you, you are not just hollow. You are completely done.

Hear about the hidden time. Some think the hidden time is yet to come. The Kingdom of God does not come by Observation. It is hidden in the inner dimension.

Hear me, and I will instruct thee; hearken to the thing that I say, and I shall tell thee more.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.

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.

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.

He believed in books, more than in people, because everything was discoverable within the pages. Read and think, and one could understand.

He could tell her that dogs used to look like cats and vice versa without a lick of proof and it would change the way she regarded the animals.

He could’ve penned a rendition of Moby Dick in Pig Latin and he wouldn’t have been the wiser.

He didn't see women as people; he saw them as trophies, and that is precisely why he never won me.

He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.

He finds a fresh sheet of paper. He lays it out on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again. Remember.

He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment.

He gazed intently at a sheet of paper, breath suspended, a word on the quivering point of his pen poised and waiting to fall. Monoliths of books and manuscripts rose around him. All were crammed with words; words packed as solidly as bricks in a wall. Armies of them; marching on from one page to the next without pause. He forced the pen in his tight grip a hairs’-breadth closer to the paper, so that the word stubbornly clinging to it might yield finally; flow onto the vast emptiness. Point and paper met, kissed, froze. He sat back, breath spilling abruptly out of him, the pen laden with unformed words dangling now over the floor in his lax fingers. How, he wondered incredulously, did all those books and papers come into existence? In what faceted jewel of amber secreted in what invisible compartment of what hidden casket did others find that one word to begin the sentence, that layered itself into a paragraph, that built itself into a page, that went on to the next page, and on, and on? ~The Bards of Bone Plain

He felt a deep urge to put some order in this chaos. Leaning against a large standing-stone by the wayside, he drew out his dreambook and began to write.

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial eagle.' Taking down the dictation, Theodora [his secretary] felt it to be almost more than she could bear. 'It is a heart-breaking thing to do, though, there is the extraordinary fact that his mind does retain the power to frame perfectly characteristic sentences.

...he had focused so long on the precision of the word, the utterance that was most unfettered by artful manipulation, that the thing had become mere style.

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.

He helped me clean out my head in time for floweret sunshine, while I raked dead leaves from underneath the bed of my nails that were waiting to be organized in diaries. As the 'Forbidding Numb' piled up, he laundered my abandoned hope clean. All that I could smell on my hands were the roots of the root words I had diluted with extra letters and slushiness. There isn't a corner that we missed; and, in no time at all, I will forget the wretchedness of this winter. Soon, I will only smell peonies and calla lilies, fresh cotton sheets, and maybe—just maybe— the paperless books that I have written being pressed like petals; yet, no longer incinerators burning perished wood that already pushed up daisies right when autumn left its leaves behind me.

He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot...

Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived.

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.

Hendaklah tukang-tukang cerita waspada terhadap hal-hal bohong dan hikayat-hikayat yang menyajikan perbuatan salah, atau yang tujuan baiknya tidak dapat difahamkan oleh umum. Atau, cerita itu merupakan satu pertarungan antara yang baik dengan buruk, lalu yang buruk mendapat pembelaan yang berlebihan sebelum dikalahkan oleh yang baik. Tanpa disedari, hal ini memberanikan orang berbuat dosa (Ihya' Ulumuddin).

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Here is an appropriate use of the exclamation mark: The last thing he expected when the elevator door opened was the snarling tiger that leapt at him. "Ahhhhh!" ... In almost all situations that do not involve immediate physical danger or great surprise, you should think twice before using an exclamation mark. If you have thought twice and the exclamation mark is still there, think about it three times, or however many times it takes until you delete it.

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

..here's the editor's prescription, writer: 1000 words daily until next checkup.

Here’s what I say; Someone has to be a rock star; it might as well be you; Someone has to write books; it might as well be you; And someone has to sleep with artists, and it might as well be you. So practice that instrument, write those words, put on those heels, and go find something, or someone, to love.

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought. ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

Her intention was to make the crowd aware, if they weren't already, that John was the giant whose shoulders Emily stood on.

Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty.

Her words dance on the page.

He’s an indulgent sort of man…… With a quick lip and a fierce tongue, the sort of tongue that draws you in with charm and words of praise, awkward silences and desperate worships.

Her words are her wings. She's flying.

He shall rule, whom they look not for that dwell upon the earth, and the fowls shall take their flight away together:

He’s only ever wanted solace. To thrive in the crevices of existence, slip into the dark cracks of life and avoid the noise. But the noise finds him, the chaos—it’s persistent beckoning toward a path that is not his own. Can never be his own. He needs seclusion. Yet every tangible ability he has requires an audience.

He taught me what true love is: helping each other breathe a little easier— smooth and steady— instead of dying a little every day, choking on being loved as someone's vice.

He took the pen and book from her and faltered. “Just write anything – anything trivial that won't matter if it comes to pass.” “Erm...” God, he was useless at this. Elena's hair turned blue. “Hey!” “What?” “I don't want blue hair! What the hell did you write that for?” “It seemed trivial.” “Blue hair – blue? That's trivial? What if I can't undo it?” Karl stared at her blankly. His throat went dry. He felt like a total dickhead, but writing really wasn't his strong point, so he went for humour instead and flashed her a grin. “I was going to write that all your clothes fall off, but figured you may have a problem with that. This was the second thing that came to mind.” (Karl and Elena)

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

He tells a story, and that's what I like. Does this fella tell a story? He doesn't spend twenty pages describing the colour of the sky?' 'He hasn't so far.' 'Good. Jeffrey Archer never talks about the colour of the sky and I like that in a writer. I'd say Jeffrey Archer has never even looked up at the sky his entire life.' 'Especially now that he's in prison,' I suggested.

He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.

He was angry with himself for having kissed her and enjoyed it, only to be disappointed by her in the end. He knew that love was never simple, but it was even less so for a vampire. He shook his head in disbelief as he walked away. He had really thought that she was the one for him and had genuinely believed that he was going to spend the rest of his life with her, but now, he knew better.

He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.