Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?

Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")

I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?" "Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

I spill my heart on pure white pages, and let the ink dance and twirl into the splattered story of my soul.

I started writing, To survive, To live, To heal, & To move on! - A writer born with the heartbreaks.

Is the healing process the writing or the reading of that writing? What are we all healing from? Ourselves? What are we all healing towards? Ourselves?

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

I stopped losing my sleep over you... Now i lie awake in search of me!!

I stopped telling you all of my secrets when you became my biggest one.

I stopped writing in a way they would understand because it wasn’t for them or even him. It was for I to understand, for I to make sense, and for I to let go of it.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.

I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. But suppose I failed? Suppose I had lost all of my beautiful talent? Suppose it had burned up in the fire of Biff Newhouse smashing my nose or Helen Brownell dead forever? What would happen to me? Would I go to Abe Marx and become a busboy again? I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— Of cabbages—and kings—” I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.

I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art.

I suck the words word-dry to me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speed still hard and harder softer then line-lined book-dry ‘til not a drop of water-blood from oak and elm and authored men is left to whisper “Read…

I suppose we all see colors outside our usual spectrum in certain people. And the saddest part of life is having known what it looks like and saying goodbye while a quiet part of you hopelessly searches for it forever in shades of blue, red, and yellow. Perhaps all my writing is just a telling to others of the color I saw.

I surround myself with books when I write, thus surrounding myself with writers... only they don't critique me and then get up for coffee.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

I suppose I also have a fondness for Cities because it was my first published novel - writing it got me over what had, up until that time, seemed like an insurmountable hurdle - the writing and completion of a novel. Oh, I'd begun several novels over the years, but never had the staying power or the faith in my own work to finish one.

I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.

‎"It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing

It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.

I taught myself how to write and draw comics at a young age. Possibly under the influence of toad venom.

It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.

It comes a point in which you don't know if you write books or the books write you

It ends when you’re ready for a new beginning.

It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write a book.

I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen

I tend to be a little - just a little - more heavy-handed with the sex scenes, and Tamara (Thorne) tends slightly more toward humor. But the joy of it is, when we write together, it draws out the best in both of us.

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

I tell myself I’m writing to someone, but most of the time I’m really just writing to that part in myself they have carved in me.

I tell the truth,' she said. 'But I tell it slant.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write book.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

It feels great to read but greater to write.

...it has been demonstrated through years of workshops that the Artist Within tends to make the same mistakes as the artist within everybody else.

It has been said that Shakespeare, the great delineator of human character, has failed in distinguishing his principal women—and that such as he meant to be amiable are all equally gentle and good. How difficult then it is for a novelist to give to one of his heroines any very marked feature which shall not disfigure her! Too much reason and self-command destroy the interest we take in her distresses. It has been observed, that Clarissa is so equal to every trial as to diminish our pity. Other virtues than gentleness, pity, filial obedience, or faithful attachment, hardly belong to the sex.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect--a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960)

I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I like the idea of sitting in the dark and knowing that I created the thing on screen, that it’s my story, but, like, no-one else has to know it was me. Does that make sense?

I think erotica goes nicely with horror, and so do romance and history - but to be honest, if it's got horror, I'm happy!

I think I had two choices: I could either work a nine-to-five job and just get by until I retired, or I could write. There isn’t anything else I’m passionate about enough to put this much work into.