Quotes Tagged "writing"

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.

If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed.

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...'' He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

End with an image and don't explain.

Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.