Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

It's what we don't say that weighs the most.

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone." [Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver (O Magazine, March 2011)]

It’s when your plans look dead that God’s resurrection power begins to operate in your life in greater measure

It's when you feel worse, that's when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit.

It's your turn to stop struggling to make a living writing and make your writing dreams come true.

It takes a lot for me to close a door, but when I do, I slam it.

It takes a lot of practices to get it right. The key is to keep practicing.

It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

It takes it out of you, writing with heart. And it was just for me really. Sort of a confirmation to myself that my inner diva can still make love to the keyboard when she’s in the mood. I have to keep her roped and gagged when I’m writing for the newspapers. They don’t like her at all. They don’t want love. They want a quick tryst in a motel room that’s forgotten in a few hours.

It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period. Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma...

It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. "Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

It tugged at his soul not to talk to other writers about his work. He loved the bank, keeping it secure and compliant with the laws and regulations. People assumed these things happened by magic. They did not. Hauer never talked about it outside the office. He didn't want to make the other writers uncomfortable. If he developed a reputation as someone who brought his work with him to writers conferences they would all turn away, to sip and swizzle their drinks without him.

It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of sand that I didn't know was there and didn't particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can't help becoming obsessed with the pearl.

It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through - the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or another.

it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.

It was more than a string of letters put together it was a thick cloak in the cold and a strong defense against an enemy It was more than the naked heart on paper it was a way to undress sadness … and sins and an olive branch for the desperate Writing was her prayer and the words were felt.

It was nice meeting you three, and I'm sure under different circumstances it would have been a pleasure.

It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters “Your number-one fan.” The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard. ‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’ It read: NOTICE NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS! ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS! Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’ That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.

It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know—which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart. Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master Molière. He had high ambitions and scorned what I wrote as frivolous and feminine. ‘All these disguises and duels and abductions,’ he said contemptuously, one day a year or so after our affair began, slapping down the pile of paper covered with my sprawling handwriting. ‘All these desperate love affairs. And you wish me to take you seriously.’ ‘I like disguises and duels.’ I sat bolt upright on the edge of my bed. ‘Better than those dreary boring plays you write. At least something happens in my stories.’ ‘At least my plays are about something.’ ‘My stories are about something too. Just because they aren’t boring doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy.’ ‘What are they about? Love’ He clasped his hands together near his ear and fluttered his eyelashes.’ ‘Yes, love. What’s wrong with writing about love? Everyone longs for love.’ ‘Aren’t there enough love stories in the world without adding to them? ‘Isn’t there enough misery and tragedy?’ Michael snorted with contempt. ‘What’s wrong with wanting to be happy? ‘It’s sugary and sentimental.’ ‘Sugary? I’m not sugary.’ I was so angry that I hurled my shoes at his head.

It were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and to suffer, and not to know wherefore.

It would seem I wouldn’t have written anything if I weren’t influenced by Canada’s history, its weather, the landscape, and its stories.

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't be careful enough.

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the same subject’ still engaged in the same fearful and fierce activity–writing and seeking to right a mortal wrong. (86-87)

I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity. In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This...and this...and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home.

I understood that it is beyond maniacal to harm someone who loved me privately, and then publicly atone for that harm I've done to that person in a publication for cheap male-feminist points and corporate money. While I have been harmed and abused as a kid, I have never had to experience watching someone publicly narratively confess to abusing me because they too were abused for money.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

I use only my penned imagination to hold my readers captive.

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

I’ve always associated reading and writing with sex.

I’ve always felt a vague sense of guilt that I search for plunder and inspiration in every book or poem or story I pick up. Other people’s books are treasures when stories emerge in molten ingots that a writer can shape to fit his or her own talents. Magical theft has always played an important part of my own writer’s imagination.

I've always kept one emotional suitcase packed. With you, I live out of one, every day, and I keep a cab on speed dial.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

I’ve always believed writing ads is the second most profitable form of writing. The first is ransom notes…

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

I've always said "Writer's Block" is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.

I've always viewed history as my personal treasure chest.

I’ve been told by a few people at conferences I have a rather academic approach to the subject matter that makes it easy for people to ask questions. I think some genre writers feel the need to “sell” or defend what they do, and so when a door opens to discuss their genre, regardless of what that genre is, they tend to get almost pushy. I’m comfortable with what I write. It is part of who I am. I don’t really need to sell it. But if I’m asked, I’ll explain it.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

I've come to suspect that whenever any ability is difficult to learn and rarely performed well, it's probably because contraries are called for - patting the head and rubbing the belly. Thus, good writing is hard because it means trying to be creative and critical; good teaching is hard because it means trying to be ally and adversary of students; good evaluation is hard because it means trying to be subjective and objective; good intelligence is rare because it means trying to be intuitive and logical.

I've always thought the best way to promote a book is to write a damned good one. If it's good enough, people will talk about it and do a large part of the marketing for you.