Writing Quotes - Page 2

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could’ve been good. There’s an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter how skilful you are...

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.

Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.

I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.

It seemed to me - articulated in words of today - that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily.

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.

Now, go, wirte it before them in a table and note it in a book, that it may be fore the time to come for ever and ever. Isiah 30:8

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

Words are beads on the strings of sentences. So make a beautiful necklace!

I recall my life every day. I recall my sins and my acts of purity. I remind myself I was never a religious man. I remind myself that I have been dead for half of forever. I remind myself of nothing. I move along to the next minute. Next day. Next year. The earth doesn’t change so much anymore. It doesn’t change so quickly. With humans, the earth had to keep changing. But you can only replace a dying thing so many times before someone notices. There haven’t been humans for years. Maybe a decade. Maybe more. I find myself loving their absence. The absence of humanity is the absence of violence. I love this peace. But then I remember my bones. My mind and my memories. I remember I’m human. I am the thing I detest. The creature that haunts my steps. It’s my shadow I see watching me. It’s my reflection in the water. I keep remembering. I live in fear. But still, I walk on.

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

The chaos in me is the chaos in you. Like the love in you is the love in me. So maybe we’re both a little crazy. Enough to believe we’re found where dreams are born and beneath our faults remain a science, where you and I will run away and leave nothing behind.

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

Stories change us. They change the world. People are stories of themselves.

[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.

I am happiest sitting against a tree, with my notebook or sketchpad on my knee, capturing the moment.

V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.

Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

Why Dream?Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams.

Surprise is when a prime minister is assassinated during his speech. Suspense is when an assassin lurks while the prime minister speaks. Balancing surprise and suspense is the job of the thriller writer.

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

If you don't write, then read.

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

Submitted for your approval--the curious case of Colleen O’Brien and thegorgeous time traveling Scot who landed in her living room.” – Rod Serling

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.

The strangest thing about demons is that they come to love you. As much as they try to murder the very core of you when you first meet, they become your closest companions. I never asked for this devil on my shoulder. But my eyes are burning and I’m not alone. If you see a red gaze at midheaven, look away. It’s exactly as they say: hell is a hungry place.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Destruction wasn't when you chose to destroy me.It was when i let you.

Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.

I don't write romance. Read it? Yes. Write it? No.

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, "Let your characters grow. Up." And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, "Recognize you are grown up.

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.

As much as I respect him, he is somewhat of an ignorant fool.

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

The hidden time is an eternity that runs through every moment. It is all-time. The hidden time is a thread, and moments are the beads on the thread.