Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

Reading is like breathing in, writing is like breathing out.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

Read everything you can on writing. Join online forums and critique groups, go to conferences, get feedback, and learn, learn, learn!

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.

Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.

Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

Read as much as you write. Go out and meet other writers. Look for stories in everything around you - music, movies, family, strangers, your bus ride to work, and of course the streets. Also - keep moving forward, keep creating new things. Leave evidence of yourself in this world. Imagine what your legacy could be and try to create it.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

Read like a detective and write like a conscientious investigative reporter.

read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

Read in order to write, but paint in order to paint.

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

Read something that YOU want to read, not something that you feel compelled to read.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Reading makes me want to write my own books, and just trying to understand what I see in the world around me makes me want to figure things out.

Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world.

Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK.

Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

Read, read read. Read everything.

Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, the hidden Science of attaining and maintaining wakefulness.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible

Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale.

Reading, writing, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, physics, and more were all at one time deep occult secrets. Today, many of these things are taught to children before they begin school. THE OCCULTISM OF THE PAST BECOMES THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE.

Read your work out loud. Don't give me that look. Read your work aloud. Don't argue. Don't fight. It will help. I promise. I promise. I guarantee it. If you find it didn't help you, lemme know. I will let you Taser me in the face. And by "me," I mean, some other guy who will be my stand-in. Probably some real estate agent or tollbooth attendant.

Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing.

Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her - to that lady called Reality.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.

real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.

realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention.

Really good writing, from my perspective, runs a lot like a visual on the screen. You need to create that kind of detail and have credibility with the reader, so the reader knows that you were really there, that you really experienced it, that you know the details. That comes out of seeing.

Real lobbying reform must end the practice of corporate lobbyists writing our laws.

Really I'm just an actor. The only difference between me and those cats in Hollywood is that I write my own script.

Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately - many people will help you unintentionally.

Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.

Really, the only thing a psychiatrist can do that a good (fishing) guide can't is write prescriptions.