Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.

The Sodomy sea shall cast out fish, and make a noise in the night, which many have not known: but they shall all hear the voice thereof.

The sonnet, a lyrical poem, the beauty and magic... convey with our hearts the truth of the universe in a single moment briefly.

The sooner you realise that your writing is all about you the quicker you’ll be able to write what you’re meant to be writing.

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

The spark of wondering is the start of writing.

The spiking temps spiked a fever for cool commons, so I made a plate of tapenade, bruschetta, and prosciutto, with orange creamsicle martinis flowing like a Zen fountain. It was hard for me to believe that I woke up that morning fighting back tears for no reason and all kinds of reasons. It is still... hard for me to believe that you have become no reason, at all.

The starvation of a child has no justification, even if the crops have failed, or the population is too large.

The Stadium Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

The story we write today will support the next generation.

The stories I read gives strength to my spirit.

The strangest thing about demons is that they come to love you. As much as they try to murder the very core of you when you first meet, they become your closest companions. I never asked for this devil on my shoulder. But my eyes are burning and I’m not alone. If you see a red gaze at midheaven, look away. It’s exactly as they say: hell is a hungry place.

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. ...I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....

The Story Is Always There Sometimes you don't need to speak to someone to know how they are feeling. You don't need to ask what is their story - often people have it written on their faces and you just have to take the time out to read it.

The story becomes clearer with time.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for.

The subconscious mind is amazingly efficient – it wants to work your story out – and while I’ve never experienced it myself, my guess is that writer’s block is the result of the conscious mind having gotten too involved in the process.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner.

The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.

The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.

The survival spirit; either read or write a story.

The teacher took two long strides and stood beside Parker’s desk. Before the boy could speak, Mr. Earl threw the desktop open. For a second, he stared into it. A white glow reflected off his face. “What is this?” he said, as he reached toward the brightness. “Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late. The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.

The tears were there, waiting to make their escape. But she wouldn’t let them. Not this time. She couldn’t. Because if there was one thing she had to do now, it was be strong and brave. She just had to be strong and brave for one week. That was no time at all. And when the week was over and Milo had found his true mate, she would disappear.

...[T]he teaching of writing is fraught with difficulties. Teaching well, in my experience and that of my students, can be very time-consuming, demanding, frustrating, and, given institutional constraints, sometimes infuriating. It demands the recognition that, in Burns's words, 'The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay.' At the same time, composition lies at the heart of education. When students make gains as writers, the gains are likely to affect other educational endeavors. And for teachers, the joy of seeing students create some new part of themselves, and do it well, washes the difficulties to insignificance and provides the impetus to try, like the Bruce's unrelenting spider, again, and again, and again.

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

The thing I want to write most is the next thing I write.

The thing I've learned is that thinking is not writing.

The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

The things I call crisis and all the things that were coming after me are all coming to serve the purpose of God in my life.

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists.

The thing that had been, it is that which shall be; And that which is done is that which shall be done.

The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.

The tides wash up the Pearl of Great Price; I see it clearly. There it is: the secret so secret that even Indiana Jones has yet to discover it. But it’s mine. It’s a style pointer, a favorite agent, a best avenue for publication. It’s a sure-fire fire-starter, a league of extraordinary information. Shall we gather at the river and share? No. I found it. It’s mine!

the thing you are most afraid to write write that -- advice to young writers

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

The tiny sculptures revelled in the demotion of their celestial peers soaking up the limelight of human attention after an eon of slumber. Woken from their torpor by the one thing that all art desires; an audience.

The tragedy of love is in its ending, the blessing—everything else. No love ever deserves to end.

The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.

The trouble, I think, is that horror is often confused with slasher, gore, and torture porn - which are actually very different entities. Slasher tends to be thin on plot and heavy on body count, whereas horror, as a veritable genre, leans more heavily on issues of morality - the eternal struggle between good and evil. Horror, as I understand it, demands answers to the hard questions about right and wrong.

The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some.

The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play—which is the better way and shows the better poet. The Plot in fact should be so framed that even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one. To produce this same effect by means of the Spectacle is less artistic, and requires extraneous aid.

The truth brings people closer together.

The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

The truth is everything.

The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear. You tell yourself you can't write in the middle of your daily life, with all its distractions and commitments, and when you finally clear the decks, light off for someplace scenic or at least private, you sit there completely paralyzed. You have devoted yourself to writing, but it has not returned your devotion. If writing were a person, you would be in an abusive relationship. The healthy thing to do would be to get a restraining order and shut it right out of your heart.

The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.

The ultimate goal of writing is forgiveness.