Writing Quotes - Page 16

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.

In a way, I was safe writing

Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.

Authors - trust in your vision.

If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed.

Writing is a craft, being an author is work, and having readers and a following is a gift.

The difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life.

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

I don't think writers need to be insane. Just crazy.

When the police willfully break the law on video and then deny the event in writing, you know that you are dealing with a blatantly corrupt group of people.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this., New York Times, April 19, 1992]

The writings are built by imagination. Emotions fill the colours to them.

Most agree that a useful definition of creative work is that it includes a combination of novelty and value. Creativity requires novelty because tried-and-true solutions are not creative, even if they are ingenious and useful. And creative works must be valuable (useful or illuminating to at least some members of the population) because a work that is merely odd is not creative. This two-pronged definition of creativity also provides an explanation of why the creative can lie close to the insane (unusual but valueless behavior).

Lead with your heart. The rest will follow.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

We write to share our thoughts and our lives.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.

The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

I love to read.

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.

There is only one rule for writing and that is go ahead and start writing.

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.

A death in reverse is the rewinding of life. I do not die of old age, in a bed surrounded by strangers my loved ones paid to take care of me. I die in reverse. I die falling backinto a younger age. From my forty-five years to twenty-five. To sixteen. When we were in love. To fourteen: when we first met. To five. To one. To the hospital my mother died at from the complications of my existence. A life for a life.

We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone.

I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking 'What have I achieved?' rather than 'What have I enjoyed?' I've been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn't be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I've enjoyed so much the writing of them.

I’m addicted to words. The only way to get my fix is to write and read.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

While the goal of a book is to create a positive emotional experience for the reader, the goal of the opening is to set the stage, to pull the reader in.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

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

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about his metaphor is that is makes writing much more than a lifesaving venture.

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.

All of my life God has allowed me to share prospectives with people who are different. You cannot lead people whose prospective you are not willing to understand.

Writing barely differs from Talking and Reading. It appoints your hand while they engage your mouth and eyes respectively. The trio need the mind to combine sensible words from a meaningful arrangement of the ‘simple’ A B C to Z.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

pencils racing across paper, a sound I like." Marisol

Our feelings are best articulated with words.

Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know.

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

A single poem, alonecan turn tidesscatter galaxiesand burst forth with riversfrom paradise.

Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.

Some people are disappointed in their life because they are trying to use the tools that God did not authorised them to use in their life, trying to build on a purpose that is not even attached in their personality.

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.

To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.

And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.