Quotes Tagged "writing"

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.

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

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early. —from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great... ...and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves. THAT is why you write fiction.

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.

Write when you least feel like it, Because that's when you write best.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.