Quotes Tagged "writing"

we do not write as we want but as we can

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

Why write wrong if the writing won’t right the wrong? (90)

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.

Everyone whirled around her, entranced by the stories in which they recognized themselves, but in the stories they were also more than themselves and it always felt at the end fulfilled, not meaningless and empty like life can sometimes feel.

Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our ætheric bodies.

@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else. A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

My job is to inspire others to live full lives. Whether I do that through my writing or my actions are one in the same.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.