Writing Quotes - Page 14

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God."Aristotle

He’s an indulgent sort of man……With a quick lip and a fierce tongue, the sort of tongue that draws you in with charm and words of praise, awkward silences and desperate worships.

You can't disappoint what God has appointed.

When I write I like to give equal justice to lyrics, too. I want the song to have meaning for me so I can make it have meaning for the audience.

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

The end is everything.

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open.

Any girl with a grin never looks grim.

I don’t want to write a book which will bring me fame for just an hour. I will try to write something which may not be very popular but it may last forever.

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

The more thou search, the more thou shall marvel.

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

God has spoken to me, without words, to my heart. He has told me that I am to rewrite the future and remind His people's faith and to help keep that faith alive attached with the Holy Bible to Him. God gave me the name Compton Gage. My earthly name is not important. My person is not part of the reminder. This is not an ordinary book, this is not a Bible. The materials of the Third Testament, was organized and re-written by me. I was given a good authority by God. BY GOD ONLY!

We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard’s sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people.

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.

Writers are influenced by their upbringing and experiences. But they are also influenced by the writings of others, the major historical events of their times and the great public and literary figures to whom they are exposed.

This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You're not doing it right.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

You can never know enough about your characters

6 criteria to upgrade literary production; Correct language, the power of the idea, the fluency in expressing, the connection between ideas and the depth of their meanings, the characters movements towards high convictions whether in the beginning or in the middle, and the ending must serves ideals and values and accomplishes victory to the human beings.

If I woke up one morning and realized that all I ever was going to be was a business man, I'd probably die. All my dreams would be shattered. Early in life I had many dreams. I dreamed of being a great basketball star. I dreamed of being a preacher. I dreamed of saving the world from war and racism. And I dreamed of being a great poet. Today, I dream only of writing.

Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.

I am a drinker with writing problems.

Dreams are fuel for creation.

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

If there’s true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it.

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

I create, therefore I am.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

A book about books is like a poem about poetry:Books are knowledge, paid for, all.Readers - horses in a stall.Stallions should always run.Lest they stale become, in turn.Running waters are most clear.In some books, you disappear –lose yourself, and track of time.How I wish that one was mine...Mine, to have, to write, to read...Mine, just like a flying steed.Mine, forever, - to improve.Would I then, of me, approve?I would not, I can't... myself.I'm but dust, swept off a shelf.Fly, can I, just 'til I'm settled,down, beside my flower, petalled.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

How you feel after reading something indicates not what you’ve read but where you are at.

I write because I cannot NOT write.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

Writer's Block is just an excuse by people who don't write for not writing.

BLACK IS SO FUCKIN' BEAUTIFUL

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy.

He shall rule, whom they look not for that dwell upon the earth, and the fowls shall take their flight away together:

Write it down now! You may never know who will read it tomorrow!

Don't make the editor's decision for her by not submitting.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had -it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...