Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

If we don't get reform in campaign financing, then we can write this country off.

If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

If we fulfill our responsibility to the Constitution, the Supreme Court will be filled with superior legal minds who will pursue the one agenda that our founding fathers intended in writing the Constitution: justice, rather than political or personal goals.

If we hooked up, he could write me ballads and stuff. You gotta admit, nothing's sexier than a guy who writes music.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would.

If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing - it doesn't matter. As long as we're creating, we're cultivating meaning.

If we write our laws and design them around the most privileged members of society, i.e., billionaire football team owner, then we forget about the people who don't have the same resources to make an appeal, to fight a wrongful accusation. Those tend to be members of the LGBT community and people of color because those are the people who tend to engage in the work of reappropriation to subvert discrimination. And yet those are the same ones being denied, based on their own identities.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

If we write our dreams and goals down, we dramatically increase our odds of realization. If we share them with others, they become potent and alive.

If what you know and what you love are the same thing, that's great. But if not, write what you love. I love history, secrets, conspiracies, action, adventure, international settings.

If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.

If writing is your passion, write and don't let anyone else convince you otherwise. You don't need to quit your day job to do it. Create a realistic schedule and stick with it.

If writing with a goal - whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic - implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda. . . a work shouldn't be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story?

If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between this image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstances, write it down.

If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

If women ran Hollywood, The Hollywood Reporter would have a "Men in Entertainment" issue every year, and those jerks would have to write something.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

If writing and publishing a book is like giving birth to a child, then book marketing is like rearing it.

If you are afraid to write or edit or assemble or disassemble, you are merely a spectator. And you are trapped, trapped by the instructions of those you've chosen to follow. Twenty people in the field and eighty thousand in the stands. The spectators are the ones who paid to watch, but it's the player on the field who are truly alive.

If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a passport to go to the next town without your wife's permission in writing.

If you are clear where you are going and you take several steps in that direction every day, you eventually have to get there. If I head north out of Santa Barbara and take five steps a day, eventually I have to end up in San Francisco. So decide what you want, write it down, review it constantly, and each day do something that moves you toward those goals.

If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.

If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can't let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high.

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.

If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.

If you aren't having fun, if you aren't anxious to find out what happens next as you write, then not only will you run out of steam on the story, but you won't be able to entertain anyone else, either.

If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.

If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft

If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than forced music. I mean, this world has enough of that right now, where it's basically McDonald's making music. 'Everybody needs another hamburger and fries.' Here's a piece of crap that nobody's gonna care about it two years.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.

If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right.

If you are writing about baloney, don't try and make it Cornish hen, because that's the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darn good baloney.