Best 189 quotes in «on writing quotes» category

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she walked away from thinking, "I can do better that this. Hell, I am doing better than this!" What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize that his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff? Good writing on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy--"I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand"--but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing--of being flattened, in fact--is part of every writer's necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.

And you have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation. In my life there have been interminable, desolate empty Sundays in which I desperately wanted to write something that would console me for my loneliness and boredom, so that I could be calmed and soothed by phrases and words. But I could not write a single line. My vocation has always rejected me, it does not want to know about me. Because this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time. It is not a companion. This vocation is a master who is able to beat us till the blood flows, a master who reviles and condemns us. We must swallow our saliva and our tears and grit our teeth and dry the blood from our wounds and serve him. Serve him when he asks. Then he will help us up on to our feet, fix our feet firmly on the ground; he will help us overcome madness and delirium, fever and despair. But he has to be the one who gives the orders and he always refuses to pay attention to us when we need him.

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.

A novel, or so-called “fiction,” if deeply researched and conscientiously written, might well contain as much truth as a high-school history textbook approved by a state board of education. But having been designated “historical fiction” by its publisher, it is presumed to be less reliably true than that textbook. If fiction were defined as “the opposite of truth,” then much of the content of many approved historical textbooks could be called “historical fiction.” But fiction is not the opposite of truth. Fiction means “created by imagination.” And there is plenty of evidence everywhere in literature and art that imagination can get as close to truth as studious fact-finding can.

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

A book is not completed till it's read.

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

Am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts, but am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. There was a boy last night who I never spoke to because I was too drunk and still shy, but mostly lonely, and I couldn’t find anything lightly to say, so I simply walked away but still wondered what he did with his life because he didn’t even speak to me or look at me but still made me wonder who he was and I walked away asking Am I making something worth while? I am not sure. I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

Art is supposed to reflect your journey through real life.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.

As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a smaller number of words.

A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

A writer can do without food for a few hours but not without the sight of books.

A writer gets to live yet another life every time he or she creates a new story.

Barangkali aku hanya punya satu atau dua kehidupan untuk kujalani, tapi bukan berarti aku hanya punya satu cerita untuk kusampaikan.

Be a good reader first if you wish to become a good writer.

Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

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.

Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Or else they are likely going to move on to another book.

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

Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.

Clichés are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

Do I have the permission to succeed at this? Who am I to tell my stories? “Who are you to not tell them?” a writer friend said to me. This writer friend — author of novels, memoirs, a short story collection — tells me that it is ownership, the acceptance of the fact that our stories make us who we are, that is the most complicated and treacherous part of what we do. When that ownership is withheld, we cannot succeed. When other forces say, no, that story is not yours, they have not only killed it and its place in your soul; they have killed you.

Details are extremely important. A story without details is like an action movie without special effects.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.

Don’t beat yourself up, son. I’m sure there is a culture on this spinning ball of dirt where you can be pretty. If not, do rock ‘n roll, or practice words. That shit’s pretty as well.

Don’t break the rules when you haven’t fully figured them out yet.

Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.

Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.

Either give it your all or don't even try!

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

Every now and then someone will ask me, "When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something serious?" I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go on I have become more and more convinced that it's not.

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

Focus on writing first.

For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

For me the poem and the poetry open mic isn’t about competition and it never will be. Honestly? It's wrong. The open mic is about 1 poet, one fellow human being up on a stage or behind a podium sharing their work regardless of what form or style they bring to it. In other words? The guy with the low slam score is more than likely a far better poet-writer than the guy who actually won. But who are you? I ? Or really anyone else to judge them? The Poetry Slam has become an overgrown, over used monopoly on American literature and poetry and is now over utilized by the academic & public school establishments. And over the years has sadly become the "McDonalds Of Poetry". We can only hope that the same old stale atmosphere of it all eventually becomes or evolves into something new that translates to and from the written page and that gives new poets with different styles & authentic voices a chance to share their work too.

Getting an idea is not enough. But when you get two ideas, and they collide and have a bastard love child, that's when true stories are born.

Everybody dies. Some die still waiting for inspiration.

Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess.

Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.