Writing Quotes - Page 27

Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn't write!

The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you've written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called "They Walk Alone." "Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if," it seemed to say.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

Praise can be your most valuable asset as long as you don't aim it at yourself.

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.

Magic and mystery writing follow the same, time-tested, three-act structure to stage their drama; set the scene, build the suspense, reveal the answer. In magic, these phases are known as the pledge, the turn and the prestige.

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.

I'll make a book on learning how to be a complete moron someday, and I'm sure no one will buy it, because everyone will have mastered that already by the time I gather enough moronism to process it into digestible upgrade instructions for your average village cyborg-idiot.

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Be what the world needs.

I wish I had another chance to write that school composition, 'What I Did Last Summer.' When I wrote it in fifth grade, I was scared and just recorded: 'It was interesting. It was nice. My summer was fun.' I snuck through with a B grade. But I still wondered, How do you really do that? Now it is obvious. You tell the truth and you depict it in detail: 'My mother dyed her hair red and polished her toenails silver. I was mad for Parcheesi and running the sprinkler catching beetles in a mason jar and feeding them grass. My father sat at the kitchen table a lot staring straight ahead, never talking, a Budweiser in his hand.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

Don't fuckin' sleep on yourself

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

I write out of revenge.

An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.

Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.

Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind’s gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind’s self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation’s effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls.

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

See the world anew and write down the bones of it.

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

People run around looking for millions of likes in their life and on the social media but do you know what? If you get just one true like from just one who loves you the most, it surpasses all other millions. God loves you the most even without make over.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.

John Hay calls the telegraph reporter, "the natural enemy of the scribe.

If your writing fails to move the emotional needle, you are not reaching your readers.

Many are they that rise up against you. Many there be which say of your soul, ‘’There is no help for you.’’ But the instruments of death is prepared for your cause.

There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.

Language is very tough, though, a tenacity that is backed up by a long history. However it is treated, its autonomy cannot be lost or seriously damaged, even if that treatment is rather rough. It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.

I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!

One thing I've learnt through writing is this: with everything in life, you have to look down deep into your heart! That fact is true with all things! If you have Jesus inside, He will give you all you need to say, and all the actions you need to do! It's not mere imagination the things I write; they are composed from the words lit up inside of me, from my Creator, who made all things bright!

At the end of all things, why do lovers break up? Because love is magic. You have to believe, for it to exist.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

To be able to influence Tanzanian literature and African literature, and sell our books in Tanzania as well as in our continent, we need to be committed to what we do. And what we do is writing. Write as much as you can. Read as much as you can. Use the library and the internet carefully for research and talk to people, about things that matter. To make a living from writing, and make people read again in Tanzania and Africa; we must write very well, very good stories.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

Do you prefer fermented or distilled?This is a trick question. It doesn’t matter how much you like wine, because wine is social and writing is anti-social. This is a writer’s interview, writing is a lonely job, and spirits are the lubricant of the lonely. You might say all drinking is supposed to be social but there’s a difference, at one in the morning while you’re hunched over your computer, between opening up a bottle of Chardonnay and pouring two-fingers of bourbon into a tumbler. A gin martini, of course, splits the difference nicely, keeping you from feeling like a deadline reporter with a smoldering cigarette while still reminding you that your job is to be interesting for a living. Anyone who suggests you can make a martini with vodka, by the way, is probably in need of electroconvulsive therapy.

I don't write to escape reality, but to show others how to better embrace it. ~ KAL

Surrounded by enemies, surrounded by evil, surrounded by darkness, injustice......."don't be afraid , those who are with us are more than those who are with them"2 Kings 6:16