Quotes About Writing

Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson. Because I would start to love them, he said.

I stare out of the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving. In life as in writing as in any type of creation that sets off to be a success, knowable and inspiring.

Ve? osamnaest milijuna godina hodamo na stražnjim nogama a još smo ?etveronošci uglavnom svi I što to zna?i znati ?itati i pisati kada pišemo ve? sigurno dulje od pedeset hiljada godina a svakih se stotinu godina rodi po jedan ?ovjek koji umije doista pisati a njega ne ?ita nitko

ÄŒEŽNJA DogaÄ'a se to u jesenjoj no?i kada pada kestenje po asfaltu i kada se ?uju psi u daljini, i kada se tako neopisivo javlja ?ežnja za nekim tko bi bio dobar, naÅ¡, bliz, intiman, drug, i kome bi mogli da piÅ¡emo pismo. Ispovjedili bismo mu sve Å¡to leži na nama. Pismo bi mu pisali, a njega nema.­ ­

Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas. He jotted down his thoughts on yellow pads, envelopes, folders, scrap paper. He wrote bite-sized philosophies about living with death's shadow: "Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do"; "Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it"; "Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others"; "Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.

I earned a mater's degree in journalism and took the first job offered, as a sports writer. Instead of chasing my own fame, I wrote about famous athletes chasing theirs.

Although the TV and radio work were nice supplements, the newspaper had been my lifeline, my oxygen; when I saw my stories in print each morning, I knew that, in at least one way, I was alive. I had grown used to thinking readers somehow needed my column. I was stunned at how easily things went on without me.

HI I'VE JOINED THE NINETIES!" it began. He wrote a few little stories, what he'd been doing that week, a couple of jokes.

Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help. Textbooks, those whores, as particularly explicit in acknowledging this, and it is with a textbook that you, at this moment, after several years in the city, are walking down the street.

Look, unless you're writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry.

The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful. However much she thought of to tell, however the words flowed in her head as she performed her chores, despite the emotion that swelled and throbbed while the storylines formed, the telling was inevitably brief and blunt, a poor thing, stunted as a failed crop.

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.

Michael Palin : I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space. Ohh! Oh dear he's signed his name again. Graham Chapman: It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again. - Matching Tie and Handkerchief, Novel Writing

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.

The question, is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of truth -- mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historial and poetical. No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has achieved; by the same token, to criticize it adversely for its failure in this respect is to treat it with the seriousness that a serious work deserves.

Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity of being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communication without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers.

Some writers have excellent "control"; they know exactly what they want to convey, and they convey it precisely and accurately

The book consists of language written by someone for the sake of communicating something to you. Your sucess in reading it is determined by the extent to which you recieve everything the writer intended to communicate.

There are many paragraphs in any book that do not express an argument at all—perhaps not even part of one.

The parts of fiction are the various steps that the author takes to develop his plot—the details of characterization and incident.

You will also find authors who do not know the difference between theory and practice, just as there are novelists who do not know the difference between fiction and sociology.

The writer isn't trying not to be caught, although it sometimes seems so. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader's possession. The writer's skill and the reader's skill converge upon a common end.