Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

The decisions that we write off as momentary, insignificant, incidental, everyday encounters are exactly when we have a chance to define ourselves. To find beauty. To engage the world around us. To create memories.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book

The democratic race is really boring when the media is basically writing stories and spending money to ask questions in a poll about somebody who is not even a declared candidate.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

... the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there's this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead. I'm always trying to fight against the impulse to make my readers like me.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing.

The Devil writes down our sins - our Guardian Angel all our merits. Labor that the Guardian Angel's book may be full, and the Devil's empty.

The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work.

The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

The difference between writing where you know where to draw the line and writing where you're being way too mean is whether you can tell that the writer is not talking to family or friends anymore. Generally, if you say something bad about somebody on stage, you need to say two bad things about yourself. A lot of times, I think I'm the worst person in the room.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

The difference when I'm writing a story versus writing a joke is that writing a joke is so much more about the structure and it's less about the conversation. To me, the thing that I love about stand-up is the intimacy between performer and audience.To get it even more conversational was something that really appealed to me and that I really enjoyed doing. My early experiments with it, with just telling a story from my life on stage, it was so satisfying to do. And seemingly for the audience as well. It's a different thing, and it's a different feeling and a different vibe.

The different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.

The difference of human being behind the guy on the page is in writing, I'm no longer conscious of personal repercussions because for that moment they don't exist. At times, I tell myself, Well, I can always go back and change that or take it out, and I find out that I rarely do. Couple little things here and there: Do unto others. Be a good scout. With all the ironies that entails, I go by that. That's a good way to live.

The different social forces that affected my parents' lives or my friends' lives or I saw around me became essential for me to write about.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

The different part of writing and singing worship lies in the identity and truth of God's Word and true intention for us as His followers on this Earth.

The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for.

The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.”“The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”“In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.”“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment they can tolerate.”“The key thing about all the world’s big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don’t get collectively smarter, we’re doomed.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

The dilemma for women - writing after everything else was finished - has prevented women from reaching their literary potential for centuries.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.

The discipline required for athletics carried through to writing. You call it obsession. I call it discipline. By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.

The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea.

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

The Dream Lover is a historical novel at once expansively researched yet intimately imagined. George Sand may be the ultimate Berg heroine. 'A life not lived in truth,' Berg writes, 'is a life forfeited.' In this latest work, Elizabeth Berg has poured her own great gifts and her own great heart into the story of a woman determined to refuse any such forfeiture, no matter the cost.

The dragons I would write about would not be the rather generalized, big, green things that I had read about in storybooks. What I wanted to create was a multiplicity of different dragon species, of all shapes and sizes, adapted to their environment and habitats in the same way as birds or other animals we see today.

The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.

The drumming helps a lot when I'm producing songs or writing songs. My knowledge of drums helps more in that aspect, (although) I don't know, man; I'm not great at any of them.