Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Wasting time on timing stuff is a good way to save time from being wasted on other pointless activities like writing, reading, and sleeping.

Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what’s happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you’ll see the change of focus—zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above—easily. You want to do that in what you write; it’s one of the things that keep people’s eyes on the page, though they’re almost never conscious of it.

Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one.

Weak words can never carry the weight of strong feelings.

We all have the time we need to tell our stories.

We all just need to be real. That is what will save us.

We all obsess over our novel’s first lines, and rightly so because from it the rest of the story must flow naturally and without pause.

We all write stories in our minds, but only few have the courage to put them on paper.

We always think that God's presence is always provided to fix our problems but what if God's presence is more about fixing your perspectives? So that you will have a new way to see your problems. If you didn't make your bed before leaving home this morning, no angel is going to make your bed for you, it is still going to be as you left it till you come back.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

We are all the authors of our own fates; but we have gotten so lost in the technicalities of forming letters and stringing words together that we've forgotten what it really means to write.

We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all.

We are all planted in God's vineyard and our lives are filled with potentials and purpose and we have all been given the hopes to anchor our lives even in the most disappointed times. So God is waiting to see what you and I will make out of the raw materials that He has given to us. He is waiting to see what we will make out of the discouragement and disappointment. I believe that in those deepest places of disappointment that the greatest grace will manifest.

We are all too fixed on wrecking ourselves rather than bettering ourselves.

We are artists. When we can’t find the beauty, we create it.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

We are doing the most important possible work in the world when we open the door and reveal our creative nature. It is the work of the Universe itself.

we are born into this world on the tailcoats of a scream. born into gritted teeth and a shock of red across the pristine. born into a solemn hush. are you evil? you, who tore into this world on a steed of crimson… are you a monster? we are born as angels, toothless, a mouth a gurgling brook. and as we grow, so do our wings, until we are high enough to see that our church is no more than a small forest and the altar a tree. are you a monster, angel with fangs? all teeth, thick with teeth, you can’t even close your mouth anymore. it rains and it’s like drowning. corn husk skin and we’re born again. into a time of being tied down, to a person, to a bed. a time of clipped wings. of holy cries out to a void. your wildness a convenience store in the desert, pale pink, dusty, arid. your wildness staring longingly at the screaming horizon and flicking another cigarette butt into the dirt, a lone oscillating fan its only company. we’re born into this concrete world, where sanctuary is to be alone or to pretend to like it. this world of broken bottles instead of leaf crunch. roadside motels proclaiming vacancies. inside and out. that pluck your heartstrings. a new church, a fresh sin. the altar now a white railing against a muted matte pink wall. you lean against it, hips jutted to the side. some of the eighties still lingers. you see a man in a leather jacket kissing a girl’s neck purple. he looks up. teeth are everywhere. hundreds of glistening teeth. you turn away. your wings shush against an old telephone booth, door forced closed. you’re calling your mother to say you’re sorry for hurting her, but when she answers you hang up.

We are each the protagonist of our life story.

We are inspired by divine power to write.

We are inspired to write by divine force.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.

We are the thoughts we choose to keep.

we as authors have been writing about people we aren't for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are people too. Instead of asking yourself, "How do I write this female soldier?" ask yourself, "How do I write this soldier? Where is she from, how was she raised, does she have a sense of humour? Is she big and tall, is she short and petite? How does her size affect her ability to fight? What is her favourite weapon, her least favourite? Why? Is she more logical than emotional? The other way around? Was she an only child and spoiled, was she the eldest of six siblings and a surrogate mother? How does that upbringing affect how she interacts with her team? etc etc and so forth." Notice how the first question gets you some kind of broad, generalised answer, likely resulting in a stereotype, and how the second version asks lots and lots of smaller questions with the goal of creating someone well rounded. One would hope, really, that we as authors ask such detailed questions of all our characters, regardless of gender. So let me, at long last, actually answer the original question: "How do I write a female character?" Write her the way you would write any other character. Give her dimension, give her strength but please also don't forget to give her weaknesses (for a totally strong nothing can beat her kind of girl is not a person, she's again a type - the polar opposite yet exactly the same as the damsel in distress). Create a person.

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence and start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors.

We can help the next generation, with the stories we write today.

We cannot do for others what they’re unwilling to do for themselves.

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)

We create. Or we die

We cannot imagine a life without poetry. Poetry lights the fire in our hearts. Poetry keeps the sparks flying. Poetry makes us happy. Poetry makes us sad. Poetry brings all the colors of the rainbow into our lives. Poetry makes our lives sparkle. Poetry makes our life live. Poetry is life.

We can read a good spiritual book in search of information or in search of God. We will find only what we're looking for.

We can reframe and recast our lives -- not with lies, not with deceptions, but with the truth of who we are and of who we are choosing to become.

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most

We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.

We don't have a choice of whom we fall in love with. We don't have a choice of whom we fall out of love with. We only have a choice to stay or leave— it's a set menu at a fixed price. But, what if we don't like either of our options?

Weekends were made for writing.

We encounter great souls by reading great books.

We follow a rule until we feel like breaking it.

We forget to thank those that hurt us the most.

We go round and round trying to convince one another that our opinion makes more sense. And the only winner is time for making us look like fools by wasting it.

We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.

We didn't do anything illegal, All we ever did was be black.. #BlackLivesMatter

We don’t read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing.

We each have a little imagination in all of us, and a book is the best absorbent there is.

We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do.

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!

...we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me -- just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable....