Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

I can arrange words on a page but I can't seem to organize books on a shelf. Over the years, My Secret has shelved thousands and thousands, held each one in his hands. He thinks they might have seeped into him, through his skin, as much as the books he's read. At night and on his days off we spend hours talking about writing. He reads three or four books at a time. When he's not working at the bookstore he goes to other bookstores around the city and browses until closing time. Holding more volumes in his hands, filling himself up with words.

I can hear the moths crackling and burning on the bulb, I see myself as one of them, flitting around this porch light. I can imagine me bewitched by the wink and sparkle, but I couldn't imagine myself taking up camp here, forever. I am suddenly abundantly aware that this is not even summer yet. This is just a porch with a jerrybuilt swing and creaky planked floors, a frayed recliner, and splays of gray hairs just (now) taking root. I remember that first summer when we strung sprinklers like toy lanterns...

I came to pen another poem for you, but even every unwritten poem is you.

I can be a woman on a mission. But I'll choose what mission that is. And that my friend is where youll see the results.

i can gladly die today knowing that a part of me will always remain within you...

I cannot bear natural light when I'm writing.

I cannot in good conscience leave the dear reader hanging with so much baggage as to cause depression.

I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them.

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

I can taste fear, and lies, on a man's skin, Cavrax." The Master Priest whispered, watching the large pulse on the cleric's neck beat like a caged thing begging for release. "You're lying to me.

I can't believe I wrote that many words in a row.

I can’t help but to wonder and write.

I can't keep myself from creativity. Ideas flash like lightning burning my bones. It must flow out of my hands or it will burst me apart.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author." [As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website.]

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

I can't wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path. And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.

I can’t sew, but I can spin one helluva yarn.

I can’t teach you how to write, and anybody who says they can is full of shit.

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

I chose to be a writer no more than I chose to be female.

I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up. And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.

I claim no victory. But there was blood on my gloves when I hung them up. When was the last time you did a story like that, out of pure indignation?

I continue to live inside a dichotomy: what was and what shall be. The pain in my skull is me trying to mesh the two.

I could be accused of glamourising crime, the favorite question on all journalists’ lips whenever they ask about anyone writing about such things. The answer to that must be an emphatic ‘Yes’. We’ve come to expect our icons of the criminal world to be larger than life, better than anyone else at foiling the final capture scene. We all love a good thriller ....

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

I couldn't ever forget the Big Muddy,' Rose said. Mama said she probably wouldn't either. 'But small, everyday things are easy to forget,' she said. 'You will want to remember those things. Life will be changed when you are grown, just the way life has changed since I was a little girl. The wild prairie is tamed now. Big cities are lit by electrified lamps. People can even visit each other from miles apart, simply by talking into a box. The only way to measure our progress is to read about what this country used to be.

I consider myself a Nordic author. But I do not know exactly what that is. I think it has something to do with time, landscapes, weather and language: a slow melancholic attitude, interrupted by dramatic emotions, like a stone in water.

I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance.

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

I cry often. I cry and cleanse my face with my tears and swim to the center of it all. A center that I have written about a thousand times, forever etched into the porcelain.

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.

I could still be more human in anything I wrote than by interacting with any of these people.

I couldn’t very well make a special delivery to the door of the constabulary now could I? And he’d have made the perfect scapegoat. That aura of misery he wraps himself in. So Byronesque. He’s too immersed in his own guilt to ever suspect it in another.

Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin' 90k word novel is the hard part.

Ideas are cheap -- making something of them is difficult

Ideas are like wine. They get better when they have time to mature.

Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

I’d become hooked on journalism at once in college when I took my first news writing class at age 19.

I'd been writing for as long as I could remember, but once I read Otherworld, I'd stopped writing original stories to focus on fan fiction. It was such a rich, exciting world that I couldn't think of writing anything else.

I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent—and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.

Ideas are not in textbooks and journals, Ideas are more deeper than the shallow written works of men. You are the idea that comes like an idea.

Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Identifying as a writer is a matter of self-acceptance. It's not a thing that can be given to you, or bestowed upon you. You are a writer if you write. That's it. If what you are seeking is to be acknowledged as a writer by other people, many of them strangers, you're in for a demoralizing journey. It is a silly club where those who have been 'accepted' are loathe to permit others into. It's sort of like how we Americans love denying our own immigrant origins while railing against immigration.

Identifying Your Dream Some people can easily identify one primary dream. For others, a dream is more elusive. These people often have many dreams at once, or a general idea of a dream that never takes a specific shape.

Identify yourself,” Colleen demanded. “I’ve got a bat and I will beat the living shit out of you if you so much as blink. I’ve got a black belt,” she lied frantically, “and…and…a gun. A big one.” - Colleen O’Brien