Quotes Tagged "writing"

The thing I write will be the thing I write.

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning

If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.

Writing is prayer.

I'm a drinker with writing problems.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud.

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.