Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.

Intent and dreaming is nice but its not, will never be enough. If you want something bad enough in life then you must fight for it or go after it. Life doesn't just come to you.

In terms of identity? I’m a commercial fantasy writer, looking to entertain my audience with fantastical tales that mix history with myth and magic. That’s something humans have been doing for a very long time, and I like being part of a long tradition of storytelling, whether that’s ancient tales shared around a campfire or modern podcasts. ... I’m currently editing a scene that involves winged lions and smoke-conjured armor, so I’m not certain I’m the best writer to ask about truth. But that being said, words and stories have great power and I think setting a scene that pulls from the real world but is set in a fictional one can cause readers to reassess and question things in a way they might not have otherwise.

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

In terms of craft, there’s no excuse for losing readers through sloppy workmanship. If they doze off in the middle of your article because you have been careless about a technical detail, the fault is yours. But on the larger issue of whether the reader likes you, or likes what you are saying or how you are saying it, or agrees with it, or feels an affinity for your sense of humor or your vision of life, don’t give him a moment’s worry. You are who you are, he is who he is, and either you’ll get along or you won’t.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

In the business people with expertise, experience and evidence will make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition and imagination.

In the days of his health and strength, Owen would have confidently refuted this picture of hopelessness, but he was tired and ill. His room now remained unheated most of the time and he was racked with coughs and ominous chest pains. In the long, miserable hours when sleep would not come, he found his eyes turning to that mouldy stain upon the wall, and he began to harbour dark thoughts. What was all this talk of the soul anyway? It could not be weighed or measured; die surgeon never discovered it. In any case it could not grant insight into stock market prices, could create no visible wealth. Indeed, there were brilliant people with titles like 'professor', people whose name trailed endless letters, who even after the most rigorous deliberations, most elegant applications of logic, doubted that such a thing as the soul existed at all. And after all, was not The City full of Smugsbys who possessed no discernible soul, yet lived after their fashion? The Great Mystery was nothing to them. They did not seek the Great Answer; they were not aware that there had ever been a Great Question! What business had he, a starving wretch, in seeking to nurture through his writings an invisible, odourless, weightless abstraction of dubious commercial value, when the very process merely drew attention away from the 'real' business of getting on? "The White Road

In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.

In the end, every startup is different. But in the beginning every startup is the same.

In the end, we begin.

In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.

In the end, you have to make love to your story and see what happens.

In the end, I will have to make a choice about how to tell my story....There has to be a moment of going forward, when all the possibilities are left behind.

In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds. This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.

In the equation of life, the limit does not exist.

In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.

In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

In the grave the chambers of souls are like the womb of a woman: For like as a woman that travails make haste to escape the necessity of the travail: even so do these places haste to deliver those things that are committed unto them.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou know not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.

In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike.

In the new faith, there is only one commandment. It is this commandment, and this commandment alone, that must be followed to end the times of suffering, which are soon to come. FORSAKE USURY.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.

In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.

In the wander land, we engage ourselves in writing.

In the very end, all we have left to atone for our faults are words.

In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.

In this crowded field of publishing, originality is king.

In this age where people can become famous without doing anything, we are now encouraging a literary and publishing atmosphere where you must become famous before you can do anything.

In this world there are two types of people: the ones who hurt, and the ones who are hurt. But if we all claim to be the victims, then aren't we all the criminals too?

In the moments of adversity, we engaged our minds on beautiful thoughts, our spirit on spirituality and our hands on inspiration writings. What a good trade of pain for peace of mind?

In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct. Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.

In the past, ten authors made a million bucks each. Now a million authors make ten bucks each. Is that better? No. That's not helping anyone. Your vanity is making it harder for real writers to feed their families.

In the realm of book arts, whenever a masterpiece is made, whenever a splendid picture makes my eyes water out of joy and causes a chill to run down my spine, I can be certain of the following: Two styles never brought together have come together to create something new and wondrous.

In the wilderness, I found solace in writing.

Intuition is truth.

In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.

Invention comes about when we let it, when we don’t mind feeling stupid as we do it— it feels like what children do, it is what children do — when we clear a place for it, become quiet, and wait.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

In truth, I bear the fault alone, for a writer longs to see his words come to life, especially as a playwright to see the characters you create in your mind come to flesh and blood on the stage. What delight strokes the vanity of a writer to hear the swoons of the penny-stinkers clamorng at your feet and calling your name.

In truth, I bear the fault alone, for a writer longs to see his words come to life, especially as a playwright to see the characters you create in your mind come to flesh and blood on the stage. What delight strokes the vanity of a writer to hear the swoons of the penny-stinkers clamoring at your feet and calling your name.

In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.

In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.

In Writing: be attentive enough to detail to spell the person’s name correctly. My name is misspelled all the time; Ramsay with an AY, not an EY. It’s not much of a personal follow-up if the recipient feels insignificant.

Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood.