Quotes About Writing

You say you often feel this madness. what do you do when it comes upon you? I write poetry. is poetry madness? non- poetry is madness. what is madness? madness is ugliness. what is ugly? to each man, something different

Because you're not accepted doesn't necessarily mean you're a genius. Maybe you just write badly.

It wasn't so much that I was TRYING to be a writer, it was more like doing something that felt good to do.

These words I write keep me from total madness.

a escrita de certos homens é como uma ponte vasta que nos leva por cima das muitas coisas que arranham e dilaceram.

still, one needs the exercise— this writing game: only the brain and soul get worked-out. quit your bitching and do it. while other people are sleeping you're lifting a mountain with rivers of poems running off.

to be writing poetry at the age of 50 like a schoolboy, surely, I must be crazy;

ama yine de biliyordum (iki paral?k deliliÄŸime raÄŸmen) ortal?kta muhteÅŸem olarak nitelendirilen çok kötü bir edebiyat?n dolaÅŸt???n?, o Philly çat?s?n?n alt?nda yapabileceÄŸimden çok da iyi olmayan bir edebiyat.

and I can still write a poem (sometimes), don't forget that, and even if they don't pay off, it's better than waiting for death and oil

Like cuneiform marks, Urton told me, khipu probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.

I've often thought that the unit of measure that best suits prose is the human breath

It is uphill work writing books

Do I like being alone so much? Yes—sometimes! Nonsense! I like it very well. So delightful to shut one's eyes and recite aloud without fear of being overheard, or dream golden dreams without the dread of being disturbed; or better still, write page after page with none to cry "Put down that pen before you kill yourself" or read some favorite author as long as one chooses, without having the extinguisher placed over the candle as a night cap.

Words, when they've been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they've passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin strippd from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless.

DESPITE THE quiet in his apartment, however, and Edie's salutary presence, he couldn't get anywhere on Breakfast of Champions. Many of the pages had been discarded from the manuscript of Slaughterhouse-Five, and he was trying to salvage them. Even so, Vonnegut thought his new novel was so asinine it embarrassed him.150

Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]

It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.

Writing is a journey into the unknown. Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won't be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can't help but be that. But more importantly, if you're honest about who you are, you'll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.

Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.

Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and re-generation that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.

We wrote about politics so you can write about daffodils

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

There's an old folk saying that goes: whenever you delete a sentence from your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground. Where it will likely require medical attention.