Writing Quotes - Page 7

Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

I love being an author - its the first job I've ever had where I'm paid to daydream. Greig Beck

But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work.

Creativity is the most supreme form of love. When it flows from any heart flooded by truth and light, it can change all those who encounter its seductive vibrations.

It's just not as hot without biting, scratching, and spanking, involved.

Other people dream while they are asleep. I plot new book ideas.

To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read.

I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

I do not steal imagination. I use it and replace it by making people read.

Write like you have many readers.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Ponder now by thyself, how great fruit of wickedness the grain of evil seed had brought forth. And when the ears shall be cut down, which are without number, how great a floor shall they fill?

Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

Every night, before he turned in, he would write in the book. He wrote about things he had done, things he had seen, and thoughts he had had. Sometimes he drew a picture. He always ended by asking himself a question so he would have something to think about while falling asleep.

There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more

I can't believe I wrote that many words in a row.

Authors can alter your life.

If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

Reading a good book is an escape to an alternative life, writing a good book is the closest thing to actually living that life.

When I finally find that one willing agent, I'll have found my prize in the Cracker Jack box.

Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.

I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, And the reason of things, And to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: And I find more bitter than death, the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands-

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

Paper is more patient than man.

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.

The unlikely group that resulted from the union of five diverse characters in their late twenties operated with surprising harmony. This cohesiveness could be attributed to two factors: 1) everyone’s issues and embarrassing pasts were plainly disclosed prior to the gang’s formation and 2) the clan had been expressly conceived as a male support group.

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.

What you see and what you listen to will determine how high you will go.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)

... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Yet as the days went by and the pains in my feet subsided, I began to look back on my little adventure with a hint of fondness. When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories.

You were meant to write this book.

The world is administered by rich but it is constructed by poor.

Have you ever asked yourself this question "what can God do through me?" The preacher has no platform if the people has no sense of mission.

I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. We have an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and I think people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling.

If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.

A writer's mind is a place where demons kill angels in disguise.

A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began writing stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade; all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.

I find that writing is as magical as the genre I write in. When the story comes alive and takes over, it's truly a journey to another world.