Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Be your best gift.

Big thoughts roam in big places. If you want to expand your thinking, expand your geography.

Bill Bryson's is a synthesizing intellect, capable of translating myriad data into a digestible narrative – rare currency in an increasingly atomized society.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

BLACK IS SO FUCKIN' BEAUTIFUL

black writers across the world need to connect. All writers, but especially writers of colour, suffer a crisis of confidence about their work.

Blank pages are cruel Pure torture in white or beige But how else to start

Blank pages are like monsters that haunt my dreams until I feed them words.

Blind barthimus used his mouth and his feet to affect what wasn't working in his life? What do you use to affect what's not working in your life? God is not interested in your perfection, He is interested in your participation. It is your participation that attracts the presence of God.

Blogging isn’t about publishing as much as you can. It’s about publishing as smart as you can.

Blood shall drop out of wood, and the stone shall give his voice, and the people shall be troubled:

@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

Books bear the dreary whisper of an author's memory, a phantom of dreams and mares woven from lessons. Read and explore a life beyond your own, one where forgotten names triumph and fall, and where love and hate crumble the hardest hearts. There is power in words. It can alter the living, immortalize the dead, and forge Gods.

Books brought me places and writing kept me in place.

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Books contain nothing, or almost nothing, that's important: everything is in the mind of the person reading them.' If you were trying to find an idiotic remark, that one took the cake!

Books allow one to jump into another person's imagination while also exploring their own!

Books are like horcruxes--without all the evil--because a piece of the author goes into each one.

Bookshops are at the coalface of our industry.

Books are more than words, they’re dreams, ideas, and answers, and that is why they fear them

Book:Sharing of life and experiences with other people.This is lifetime notes for all generations.

Books used to be written by humanity's greatest thinkers, or at least our greatest entertainers. Now every halfwit can publish his verbal diarrhea. And millions of shitty, mediocre, uninspired, trite books are drowning out mankind's greatest literary accomplishments.

Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they're making an excuse for poor prose.

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways.

Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.

Breaking through writer's block is like thinking out of the box: Both require an ability to imagine a world outside your four walls or rearranging them to get a better view.

Brain Child. Making up stories from my brain since 1986.

Bringing the workbook to publication also meant an ending. An ending of many days and hours of interaction with Tyrone. I knew the day would bring that ending when we began but as it crept closer I felt the weight of hesitation as much as the excitement of relief. I found myself with thoughts like, "it will never be the same again as it is now" and "I am not sure I want this interaction to end". I love that man dearly and will forever be changed from knowing him. Handing our diligent work over to Kendall-Hunt for publication was as if I was handing the entirety of the relationship over.

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else’s snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It’s world-creating. It’s raw, exposed dreaming. It’s humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next. It’s what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience.

Breathe in the beauty all around you.

Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.

Brilliance of the brain must be admired more than beauty of the body.

Bring on the controversy. I write real life. It's harsh and sometimes gritty, but it's real. Why should we tip toe around that?

Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was "to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress.

Broken hearts, you can run, you can hide and perhaps the earth is big enough to believe you’re safe. So maybe for a moment you have escaped but hear me, hear me well. Love will find you and it will leave nothing behind.

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb "snuffle.

But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliche'. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest," - these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away, We stop reading.

But as I began to write this book, I realised that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning. With the help of my mother, the memories of our lives in North Korea and China cane back to me like scenes from a forgotten nightmare. Some of the images reappeared with a terrible clarity; others were hazy, or scrambled like a deck of cards spilled on the floor. The process of writing has been the process of remembering, and of trying to make sense out of those memories.

But at least he had grasped one small aspect of poetry then: that it was something extremely personal, almost a gift one wrapped up for oneself alone; that it was foolish to expect everyone to respond to poetry in the same way, or even to respond at all. Not a gift, it was a beautiful burden. It was a melancholy art, and what it served for best was to provide life with a certain aptitude for sadness.

But experience isn't something you go and get--it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience;" whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. I invite you to meditate on a pair of sisters, Emily and Charlotte. Their life experience was an isolated vicarage in a small, dreary English village, a couple of bad years at a girls' school, another year or two in Brussels, which is surely the dullest city in all Europe, and a lot of housework. Out of that seething Mmass of raw, brutal, gutsy Experience they made two of the greatest novels ever written: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. ... They knew their own souls, they knew their own minds and hearts; it was not a knowledge lightly or easily gained.

But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page.

But books were full of stories and stories were full of lies and lies hurt Jesus's feelings, so I didn't know what to think. I blamed my family. They were the ones who taught me so much about telling stories, and how not to do it, and then, in inspired moments of surprise, how to tell one so good you forgot what day it was, and I liked forgetting what day it was, so I made certain life choices that would allow me to get paid to forget what day it was and teach others to forget what day it was, which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them.

...But I am not quite Jane Austen yet and there are limits to what I can stand.

But I can’t control my dreams. I can’t even remember them. For all I know I’m having the time of my life when I sleep, but I just can’t remember. So I’m forced to live in a life I have no control over. A life where I’m either numb to everything or terrified of every thought that crosses my mind. If this is all just a dream, then it sure is a disappointing one. But I still have time to try and control my dreams. I have time to try and make my dreams a reality in this waking life as well. The one bloody thing I have is time. I’ve got to remember that. I still have time. And despite everything, there is something reassuring about that.

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalin”)

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

But I don't want to write my own fiction,' Cath said, as emphatically as she could. 'I don't want to write my own characters or my own worlds -- I don't care about them. . . . I'd rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.