Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Well, for instance, why does everything always have to be written from the point of view of a human being? Why not write from the point of view of a cat? Or a tree?

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn't work without mystifying the process. The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious. Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious. Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself.

Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?” She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.” “What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her. “Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied. “Choices,” he echoed. “Of who they become.

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. " "Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry." "Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer." Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed. "But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.

Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.

We’ll often fear what we don’t understand.

Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. "The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically...impossible." "Good thing, too," reply Landon. "It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Well written article as like as Wrist Watch of Dad, that's hookup you wear it again and again

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.

We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

We must stop this unimaginable atrocity before it becomes a reality.

We only pay for what we admire, want and recognize as necessary, even when a cup of coffee is priced at the same value of a book that can change our entire future.

We pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our life is astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy.

We're all in a steel cage, jousting for literary relevance among a sea of true talent. Our way out of this Thunderdome is not through any given contract by any given publisher. Our way out, the key needed to escape said cage is in our sui generis ability to tell the shit out of a story. Go forward, woke.

We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.

We’re all just waiting for our moment to redeem ourselves.

We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.

We’re only instruments of love, flowing through heaps of pain hoping one day we’d hatch a passion of our own.

We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day."If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

We should all live as though someone is writing a book about us.

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance. We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.

We slept on mattresses stuffed with the soft seed-heads of dandelions.

We write from soul of the heart.

We who live by writing and publishing want — and should demand — our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. It’s name is freedom.

We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.

We write our book every day, but some of us never sit down to read our books.

We write to share our thoughts and our lives.

We write to share the deepest heart-talk of our souls.

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.

We write or we are written upon. The whole of our lives is the clumsy attempt to wield the pen with grace.

We writers are a crazy group. I can't think of any other profession where the actual work is deep within, uncomfortable, and wanting out.

We write to give strength to our soul and to inspire spirit of other souls.

We write until we find our way. Then the real fun begins.

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..." "What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh. "Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity." "A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." [Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

What are minnows but brief flashes? And what are thoughts? And how do you capture a brief flash, even for a second?

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don’t have language for. What fascinates me about that is we’re talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It’s almost a paradox that you’re seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn’t have language for it.

What did you do in your songs? I don’t know, I’ll never know, you say. Someone else will write them about me, won’t they? I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one. But I have to sing this song. I’m still here.

What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my work repeat themselves without my realizing. There would be no way of knowing this, for during the writing of any single story, there is no other existing. Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what basis he lives with his own stories.