Writing Quotes - Page 19

My pragmatic nature, my impatience, will most likely have me drunk on aged spirit by noon.

Blood shall drop out of wood, and the stone shall give his voice, and the people shall be troubled:

There is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, 'See, this is new?' it had been already of old time, which was before us.

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

I was born into this torrid world a degenerate, eternally condemned a vessel of belligerency, destined to one day end. But despite my mortal disposition, I possess my voice. I have that which is gifted to me from the bosom of the gods. The beauty of self-expression. And through this gift I will come to know and share the true nature of reality

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

I write what the Holy Spirit put on my mind.

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

But I don't want to write my own fiction,' Cath said, as emphatically as she could. 'I don't want to write my own characters or my own worlds -- I don't care about them. . . . I'd rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

Writing had never become routine for him, but remained a constant surprise. He was always surprised at how much fun it was, once it all got moving. And never failed to be surprised at how bloody hard it was. It was like having an intense, frustrating love affair with a capricious, gorgeous, and often mean-spirited woman.He loved every moment of it.

The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .

Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

Time is tick, tick, ticking away. How many souls will I capture today? Will they be a challenge or will they be given? Only time will tell as the clock keeps tick, tick, ticking. Your god has arrived with enough hatred for y’all, with enough evil for the big and small, so come one, come all. I will shred your souls and place them in my satchel, call you a settler and make you my peddler. Come one, come all, come stand behind your god. I will lead you into the darkness of Earth's end. Come one, come all, my wilted flowers, come claim your title, speak out and cheer it. Come one, come all, let’s have a ball, my wilted flowers . . . Sweet, Unconquerable Spirits.

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

Band together with the brothers and sisters of misery and never stray. You are the integral part of the deeply depressed. We found you. Hooray.

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.

Save your work, you may never know when the light will go off.

Every great novel begins with a single word. One word, followed by another and another and another. Sentences forming paths to that dream.

To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.

Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.

People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.

When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Stories change the world.

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...""What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh."Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.""A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of an abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.

Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.

Today, death is your opponent.

Writing has the power of permanence.

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

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.

I’ve learned that the creative life may or may not be the apex of human civilization, but either way it’s not what I thought it was. It doesn’t make you special and sparkly. You don’t have to walk alone. You can work in an office — I’ve worked in offices for the past 15 years and written five novels while doing it. The creative life is forgiving: You can betray it all you want, again and again, and no matter how many times you do, it will always take you back.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

I think of myself first as a singer, meaning an interpreter. Then I think of myself as a writer. It is an outlet I have to have. I get very hard to live with without something happening to write about.

If you ask me I think the greatest breakthrough each and everyone of us need is not on finance, marriage, work, relationship, own house, car but self. The first breakthrough should start from being selfish.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.