Writing Quotes - Page 24

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

Madness and chaos are self-destructing but over thinking is the suicide.

You’re not a bad person, you’re just a little bit different and I’m a sucker for that.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

If words are to be uttered, they would be from behind the partition. Unaccountable is distance, time to transport from this present minute.If words are to be sounded, impress through the partition in ever slight measure to the other side the other signature the other hearing the other speech the other grasp.

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."[From the preface.]

Embrace what works and discard what doesn't.

Cleave to the common good. We are all responsible for bringing about the time of great suffering, for its continuing.

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder")

Everything has its poetry. 94

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters' arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

Storytellers are individuals who enjoy creating a holiday for the mind.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Gun for sure is louder than a Pen, bullet is hotter than Ink, but Death is not a silencer for Pen.

Your need to feel significant will never be met, until you can conquer your fear and manage your focus.

People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard because they don't read it... well, ok, go ahead. Write a bestseller. Don't forget to go through the correct edit process. We'll wait.

Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.

If you never listen, you can't see. The devil has got so many people so disconnected that they cannot even listen or even sense when the Lord is speaking.

Good poetry reveals the beauty of joy and tragedy.

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

With all honesty, somewhere between the hello and the dreams I saw you in I fell in love.

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.

Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

Elegant writers depict intricacy with simplicity.

How, and when shall these things come to pass? wherefore are our years few and evil?

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life?

There is nothing to me but you. I know it’s pathetic but, oh darling, it’s true.

Manufactured spirit is much more reliable than organic spirit.

Characters are the lifeblood of anygood book.

With writing, we have second chances.

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

There is but one art to omit.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters “Your number-one fan.” The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons.

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.