Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

What is a novel if not a trap for catching a hero?

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

what is poetry if not seeing and feeling, and feeling, feelings running deep and okay – do I see, notice the gray pigeon feathers that heave by on drafts of passing cars reeking, leaking gasoline fumes and okay – do I feel?

What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books. I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.

What is Religion according to you? “Religion is your idea of leading life, the value you not only hold close to your heart but ones that you practice, the passions in your life, the faith in your ideals, the vision you have for your life and the society around you.

What is so frightening about [writing]? I still don't know. Perhaps it's the horrible knowledge that no matter how well you write, the resultant product will never correlate exactly to the truth, will never arrive with quite the melodious voice you hear in the acoustic cavity of your mind.

What is life? Life is living in this moment, experiencing and experimenting but experience isn’t life. Life is reflecting and meditating but reflection isn’t life. Life is helping and guiding but philanthropy isn’t life. Life is eating and drinking but food isn’t life. Life is reading and dancing but art isn’t life. Life is kissing and pleasuring but sex isn’t life. Life is winning and losing but competition isn’t life. Life is loving and caring but love isn’t life. Life is birthing and nurturing but children aren’t life. Life is letting go and surrendering but death isn’t life. Life is all these things but all these things aren’t life. Life is always more.

What is my strength, that I should hope? Is my strength the strength of stone? Or is my flesh of brass? Is not my help in me.

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!

What is the beauty of a thing if others do not take pleasure in it.

What is the finding of love, but a voice answering a voice?

What is your motive when you go to church? To feed or to be fed? To serve or to be served? To worship or to be worshipped? To praise or to be praised? To teach or to learn? To give or to receive? Remember the woman with the issue of blood did not met Jesus in the church. Blind barthimus was blind though he could hear did not see Jesus but heard about Jesus passing; I am just wondering how many people have heard about Jesus through you? Who was this man interested in? Your answer might be Jesus of course but definitely not. The man loves himself and so was seeking healing even when the crowd could not allow him see Jesus. Let the crowd in the church not deceive you because God usually speak to one. (A bit deep).

What it has to do is move--end up in a different place from where it started. That's what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.

What is your advice to young writers?" "Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes." "What is your advice to older writers?" "If you're still alive, you don't need any advice." "What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?" "What makes you take a shit?

What is writing after all but an attempt to sort out the confusion of life?” @isabelallende

What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.

What man is able to do that, that thou should ask such things of me?

What luck has gave you will probably leave you.

What prevents you from fully expressing yourself?

...what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.

What’s a TH?” “A Traffic Hazard,” Heeb clarified. “Oh you mean because the woman is so hot she’ll take your eyes off the road?” Narc confirmed. “Exactly.

What’s behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself.

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.

[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

What starts in the heart doesn't stay in the heart, it either turn into action or words.

What’s the use of having a great book if you have a lousy life? These days, especially, having a great life can easily translate into a great book.

What's writ is what's read, yet the meaning is gone, since context is what gives each quote its own home.

What the future held for spirit, Emily could only imagine.

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

What's wrong with writing about love? Everybody longs for love.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?' ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

What will he then do unto his name whereby we are called? ...of these things have I asked.

What we write is fiction; what we experience, truth.

What we have now, shall never be again. The poets of the past sit in amazement of the wanna-be's of an era long gone.

What will I write in this beautiful book? She carried the book to class for the rest of the day, and that night she put it under her pillow, still blank. She liked it blank right now, liked to know that it was waiting, listening. Just like her friends.

What words are there to tell how long a night can be?

What you see and what you listen to will determine how high you will go.

What writing teaches me, over and over, is that God is waiting to be found everywhere, in the darkest corners of our lives, the dead ends and bad neighborhoods we wake up in, and in the simplest, lightest, most singular and luminous moments. He's hiding, like a child, in quite obvious and visible places, because he wants to be found. The miracle is that he dwells in both.

What would life be like without her writing? Writing filled her life with beauty and mystery, gave it life...and promise.

When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

When a character comes to life, it’s like meeting a new friend for the first time.

What you tell yourself as the result of abuse is usually worse than the real truth.

What you think and how you think, influences what you ink and how you ink.

When addressing religion in morphology the average person will seek religious texts and otherwise human instruments and tools to explain the Universe or their own spiritual experience. Yet human hands are not paws or clawed. Humans are not quadrupeds so texts for cats is kind of out of the question one might think.

When a draft looks terrible, I don’t try to convince myself that it’s actually good or even that someday it will be, only that it’s my job to work on it whether it’s good or not.

When a day goes by and I haven't written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.

When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete...you feel as if you could do anything.