Writing Quotes - Page 4

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

For that is what you are, that is who you are – you are an author. You cannot cease to write any more than you can cease to breathe...This difficult season will pass – your eyes and mind will inevitably be opened once more to the wealth of ideas all around you...And even if the ideas around you fall short of what you seek – even if, as you say, you have not the heart to write… perhaps it is your heart you ought to write of. - Laurie to Jo, on writing

So what? All writers are lunatics!

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or to present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.

Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three....

What is your advice to young writers?""Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.""What is your advice to older writers?""If you're still alive, you don't need any advice.""What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?""What makes you take a shit?

The pen is mightier than the sword!

That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.

Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

With our writings, we can right the world.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it's shit. Write some more. Repeat.

Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Did you ever think about writing memoirs? You are a writer, and it may be interesting for people to read your story."I hate memoirs. But I am sure I will write a book about the Bowery Mission,” Michael said.

A stream of thoughts flows through one’s mind at a sacred-time.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.

Write and your experiences with others. Never underestimate your writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people.

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.

Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

The thing that had been, it is that which shall be; And that which is done is that which shall be done.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

I've finally decided to write about profit for a changeBut before I really started I already started to feel lameBaby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed

I've always said "Writer's Block" is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.

Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.

All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.

What do you feel like you SHOULD be doing instead of writing? IF you have an answer, then you have guilt. The "should" of life are always linked to guilt.

It ain't a crapshoot unless you write crap.

Do you know where your breakthrough begins? Your breakthrough begins where your excuses ends.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doin

The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.

At a time like this maybe the world is looking at us not just at a miracle crusade or sunday church service but the way we are living. Maybe they want to see whether what our Master left for us worked for us; there is a counter spirit to the spirit of fear, it is the love of God.

The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.

There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not,then you miss the point of writing.

This isn’t a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It’s a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it’s printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Write every day. Even if it's only a letter.

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.

There were tough thoughts battling one another inside his head for the right to become reality.

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.

It's not a job but a condition.(Alan Garner on writing)

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

I wonderif you ever read my poemsand wish they were writtenfor you.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.