Quotes Tagged "writing"

I’ve realized people can live in a world they’ve personally constructed through a distorted lens of guilt and shame, whether they deserve it or not.

Hard life... write more! Life sucks... write more! No matter what don't stop. Keep to the grind and don't let up. Somewhere out there is your ramp to success. Forget about the exits or the shortcuts along the way. Stay on the highway and when the ramp comes... take it and go!

And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have heard that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a hero’s search for a father. It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn’t be embarrassing. It’s simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn’t feel particularly good if I found another father.

The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction.

When they show you who they are — you know what to do already.

Writing poems is the best revenge.

You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

There are going to be people who don't like your book and that idea may stop you from writing. But, remember that there are people in the world who will like your story and want to hear what you have to say. Write for them.

If you are unsure which age group to write for, start with the story that's burning within.

I think that a true writer will keep on writing, no matter what. Even if they don’t get published, even if they’re constantly faced with criticism… they’ll keep writing. The act is essential to a writer’s existence. Without it, life would have no meaning.

Love is Energy and everything is Inspiration

[Writing] is a pleasure for about a week and a half. When you finish a novel, you feel triumphant, until ten days later, that is, when you have to begin thinking about the undoability of the next novel. [When I start a book I am always a beginner.] Always. Always. You can say one of the reasons that I've quit is that after fifty years I was still an amateur – a clumsy amateur lacking confidence and wholly befuddled for months and months at the beginning of every new book. Now, luckily, I remain an amateur only at the rest of life. [You don't gain any confidence little by little.] Not at the start of a book. It's a rare writer who is confident at the outset. You are just the opposite – you are doubt-ridden, steeped in uncertainty and doubt. Henry James, the great powerhouse of American fiction, the novelist's novelist – our Proust – put it perfectly while speaking, in a story of his, of the novelist's vocation. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

A true writer recognizes the insanity in themselves.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe

As a start-up writer, there is need for you to define your area of interest. You should know what inspires you to becoming a writer. Choose what interests you most and make it your pathway to achieving your dream, then work on it. Both fiction and nonfiction writers have everything in common- they are writers, authors, and the both achieve greatness and influence when they write prolifically.

At the beginning, you need no support other than your pen and paper to write down the ideas that your brain is ready to supply you at any given time.

You, too, can observe the beauty of flowers and nature through the windows of your life if you are willing to open them.

Try and remember what you said you'd do and why you said you'd do it. Forget what you think other people want the thing you said you'd do to be. The thing you said you'd do should only be what you want the thing you said you'd do to be. If the thing you said you'd do makes other people happy, that's great but don't say things or do things just to make them happy. Find new ways to do the thing you said you'd do that don't change the meaning of what you said you'd do. Have the purest of intentions for what you said you'd do and do it bravely. If the thing you said you'd do becomes successful, continue to act and think like it is unsuccessful, otherwise you'll spend your time worrying that it might become unsuccessful. If you said you'd involve people in the thing you said you'd do, listen to them when they say what they think you should do. If you said you'd do the thing you said you'd do alone, then go boldly into the wilderness and make your own soul be company enough, while you do the thing you said you'd do. Do right by the thing you said you'd do. Tend to it and love it. By trying to remember what you said you'd do and the reason why you said you'd do it.

Writing is the mirror in which I see myself most clearly.

Words will never oxidize