Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Nevertheless now have I asked thee but only of the fire and wind, and of the day where-through thou hast passed, and of things from which thou canst not be separated, and yet canst thou give me no answer of them.

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice.

Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, asssent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man's practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline

Nights I stay up writing about you, wondering where you've gone, my heart doesn't understand your absence, I do my best to reassure, but its erratic beating tells me it doesn't believe my lies.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Nilai akhir dari proses pendidikan, sejatinya terrekapitulasi dari keberhasilannya menciptakan perubahan pada dirinya dan lingkungan. Itulah fungsi daripada pendidikan yang sesungguhnya.

Noble literature lasts for centuries; every ambitious writer aims for that. When a writer's words kept preserved for generation after generation, it is proof that what he or she wrote left a positive impact on humanity. If you are a writer keep that in mind, your words may last after your death, so ask yourself: Am I leaving what is worth to be read over and over again? Make this your compass.

Nobody knows the words to use today. They are committed only to their individual furies.

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

No crime is a means to an end. No crime can be rationalized.

No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." (The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

No, I am just writing this because, sometimes, you’re still all I have to write about. Sometimes you’re the only thing that my typewriter needs. I am writing this because you are, because you’ve always been the one person who can always make me bleed.

No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.

No matter how busy life becomes, I want to be clear For you and your only, I will always be here.

No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution.

No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet. I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.

Nommer c'est montrer et [...] montrer c'est changer.

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off.

No. Not really red, but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul. Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices. We can't be anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

No one can tell you what you can and cannot put in your book. So be brave and just write!

No one has ever stood out by being a conformist.

No one is better than anyone else. Some just simply don't fulfil their potential of being the best they possibly can.

No one ever tells you that: that there’s no method. Writing’s a lawless place.

No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It is not cheap, and it’s hard to come by, owing partly to the fact that it is the heir of disappointment, frustration, betrayal and deceit. However, it is not the inheritance that matters so much as what you do with it. In the face of seemingly insurmountable problems what do you do, and why do you do it? The same holds for dramatic characters whose strength, courage, insight and wisdom have to be earned.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

No one knows if something works until it actually works. That's why you must always try.

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

No price is too high to pay, to be the author of your fate.

Norman Mailer enhances the beauty of pugilism by elegantly exploring it.

No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.

Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?

Not everything can stand the test of time, but a story can.

Not all writers are silently suffering inside. But it certainly helps.

Not every self-published indie author is bad. There actually are some very good ones. But they're the exception, not the rule.

Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

Not every story started off big enough to notice.

Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure

Nothing that is written is of the least importance.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.