Quotes Tagged "writing"

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.

I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

Good writers don’t moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke’s gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!

Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

Now may this little Book a blessing be To those that love this little Book, and me: And may its Buyer have no cause to say, His money is but lost, or thrown away.

Hal lain yang menghalangi produktivitas ialah pujian kritisi. Pujian itu bagai menantang saya, agar saya menulis yang nilainya sama dengan apa yang terbaik telah saya tulis selama ini.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!