Quotes Tagged "writing"

But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.

You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Writer speaks a stench.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

You can write about anything for children as long as you've got humour.

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.