Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

The current state of music journalism is not bad, but it's not great at all. Some of the hip-hop stuff people get into is exciting, because there's a passion and there's something to explain to a more mainstream audience, so you get these passionate writers who want to express their love for rap and hip-hop, which is cool. But there are too many magazines, and the access has been diminished, so the quality of profiles has gone way down. Internet stuff can be really good, though. I like the dialogue between fans on the Internet. I think that's the best rock writing that's going on right now.

The daily writing practice is something I used to hear batted around a lot in writing workshops - which is probably why I dropped out of all the writing workshops. I wish I could take credit for innovating a new approach to writing, but the truth is that I've managed to write books despite myself. I'm lazy and ungovernable and undisciplined, but I do have a lot of anxiety about never amounting to anything and ending up as a bag lady.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.

The Danger of a Single Story”, which has resonated with me immensely every time I read it. “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, “secondly.

The day it comes out, there's already things that you start to go, 'Oh, I should have done that a little differently.' You start to make a list in your head. I actually write things down -- what I'm going to do next time.

The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.

The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again. It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I'm terrible at writing overtly political poems.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

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.