Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

But then one time, you track down an email address and you're near a computer with Internet access so you don't have that nice cushion and you type what you're feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren't. They weren't worth saying at all.

But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it." [Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]

But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.

But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

but the attitude reading and writing gives you

But the thing I remember most about the screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a bit before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it." (Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long words that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb. every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.

But these were dreams - and very ambitious dreams - of the future. For the present, he wrote what he could and set about the pleasurable task of revealing his talents to the world. To his mild surprise, the world remained singularly unimpressed. 'You have some excellent material here/ wrote one publisher, 'but our reader feels the presentation to be a little laborious, and consequently we do not... etc...' Well, that was pretty much the story. Winter drew on; Owen eked out his remaining money on food and fuel, then learnt a little about hunger and cold. One publisher took the trouble to send a list of reading, so that he might submit the kind of book they required, and he sought out the titles at the local library. He read with growing interest, and soon saw where he had gone wrong. The field seemed to be held by a group of writers whose terse, taut style suggested the breathless delivery of some vital message, the gist of which seemed to be that man had a mean destiny and that all was for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Owen was by this time so impoverished that he might have sought to share their generous publishing rights and big sales, but for the fact that he could not master the trick of seeing the Universe as a meaningless mistake, or the Human race as sick and soulless automata. He could have joined another, minor school, who wove elegant references to myth and faery-tale into their novels. He was, after all, seeking to do the same. But to his amazement he found that they did so, not with the intention of suggesting that the apparently commonplace might be wonderful, but that the apparently wonderful was, after all, merely commonplace. On a superficial reading they appeared to embody the ancient traditions in their works, but Owen, who could not get the knack of superficial reading, discerned that they were merely holding up a highly polished mirror to such subjects from a safe distance, producing as a result a diminished reflection, a perfect pigmy reversal of all that myth, legend and even homely folktales intended. While the ancient writers offered a simple, sometimes crude, or even ridiculous surface, beneath which the reader might discover unguessed levels of meaning, the work of the modern myth-mongers presented a clever, intricate and finely crafted surface, beneath which lay - nothing at all. And how could it have been otherwise, when true devotion to the Eternal Mysteries found no place in their hearts? There was no bedrock of belief. So he went his own outmoded way, as the days grew colder and the cupboard became bare. He was not aware that his circumstances affected his state of mind, but an objective eye might then have discovered in his work - in the sombre pages of The Night Before Winter, for instance - a distinctly darker thread. "The White Road

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.

But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.

What is the trick for writing dialogue? That you are not running a wiretap for the FBI. I used to have a boyfriend who was an assistant District Attorney in narcotics in New York and he used to have to read wiretaps. And he would bring them home, three feet high, two women who were watching television in their separate apartments, saying, “I need Pampers! Do you have Pampers? Did you see what he just did on that show?” Four thousand pages. They were girlfriends of suspects and it was a real cautionary tale in how you don’t want people to go on and on. And dialogue is nothing at all like how people talk. Dialogue, hopefully, if you’re doing it well, is a couple of well-chosen kernels that stand in for conversation, that represent conversation. Conversation is very boring. Even interesting conversations.

Buying, borrowing, or stealing the book is the easy part.

But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.

But, you must remember, whatever you eat, make sure you have at least one bowl of salad with it.

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.

By all means, tell the cops about the crazy robot lady with the black leather body suit and the Kill Bill sword. Hope you like straitjackets.

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can’t walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It’s what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOK Translation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day.

By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.

By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and without character and plot, no book can survive.

By studying, understanding and do the wills of the book, you renounce your mortal life.

Bytelling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

By writing, we partake in something greater than ourselves. Pick up pen and paper or take a seat at your computer today and create something of beauty.

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

Cainan (sometimes the name is spelled Kainam) was the son of Arpachsad: "And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing, which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it, for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun, moon and stars in all the signs of heaven." Here, then, is the origin of the star worship of the Sabians traced all the way back to the mysterious Watchers--whoever they were, whatever they are--who settled in the Near East in antediluvian times, taught our ancestors forbidden knowledge, broke some fundamental commandment by mating with human women and, as a result, were remembered as being responsbile for the great global cataclysm of the Deluge.

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you.

Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? "Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat..." That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!

Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness he said, no, but with money you could buy the big boat and go right up to where the people were happy. With a teacher you can go right up to where the writing is done; the leap is made alone with vision, subject, passion, and instinct. So a writer comes to the page with vision in her heart and craft in her hands and a sense of what a story might be in her head. How do the three come together? My thesis is the old one: they merge in the physical writing—inside the act of writing, not from the outside. The process is the teacher.

Cara terbaik untuk meningkatkan kualitas karakter, kompetensi dan kesejahteraan hidup seseorang, adalah dengan menanamkan budaya literasi (membaca-berpikir-menulis-berkreasi). Cara terbaik untuk menanamkan budaya literasi yang kuat pada seseorang adalah dengan menjadikannya sebagai seorang penulis. Karena setiap penulis, secara otomatis akan melewati tahapan membaca, berpikir, dan tentu saja menulis serta berkreasi.

C'est tellement impudique, tu nous racontes tellement, je me retrouve à chaque page, mise à nu, disséquée, passée au crible, et j'ai l'impression de te découvrir, toi, certains aspects de ta personnalité dont je ne soupçonnais pas l'existence[...].

C'est neuf pour moi, et très déroutant, lui ai-je dit. En voyant tes annotations sur mes feuillets, j'ai eu le sentiment de perdre un peu de maîtrise sur mon texte, de liberté, de subir une espèce de... censure. Une censure de ce que je suis au plus profond de moi, tu comprends ? Je l'ai vécu comme une intrusion en moi.

Cesto kazemo da smo emotivno nedostupni, ali nas pogled prevari i kaze da smo uvek dostupni.

Celebrate your day of birthday as special day.Make a specific birthday wishes and write it down.You will be amazed about the power of pen and inner strength to accomplish the wishes. This will be a special gift for yourself on each birthday.

C’est pour l’amour de la liberté qu’il devient « nègre » et se réduit en esclavage : pendant des années, son génie et son nom resteront invisibles dans les ténèbres de la sous-littérature

Chances are, even your friends and family aren't really interested in reading your self-published book. Your mom might read it to do you a favor, but if it wasn't written by her precious little angel, she probably couldn't care less about it.

Characters are limbs that writers use to kill with.

Characters in a novel or a play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to... This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognise that they are artificially composed.

Changing our perspectives allows us to shift from the mental trap of rumination -- or ruination -- to the empowerment of reflection.

Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn't even know it.

. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.

[Charlotte Brontë] once told her sisters that they were wrong - even morally wrong - in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, 'I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.

Chapter breaks are not so readers have a place to stop reading; they're the breath to take before the roller coaster plummets down the hill

Characters are just extensions of my madness.

Characters are the lifeblood of any good book.

Characters who simply have goals opposed by others do not create the effects of a story.