Quotes Tagged "writing"

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.

How many things can I do without?

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.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall... And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day.... To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.

The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.

Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.   Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.   Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.   Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues.  A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.

Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather. Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it? Byron:Make a departure. Gutman:From yourself? Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be! Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.

I think maybe today a poem I hope after breakfast I start trying pulling it out of my own gut mostly by force

i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love. You think? I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half-life of love is forever. You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.