Quotes About Writing

DFW's writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect.

warriors. In 2007 Cooper fought a Chinese long-sword instructor on a Hong Kong rooftop—he never thought the experience would help him write battle scenes. In addition to being a member of the Mongoliad writing team, Cooper has written articles for various magazines. His autobiographical piece "Growing Up Black and White," published in Seattle Weekly, was awarded Social Issues Reporting Article of the Year by the

Il mondo moderno è un disastro per chi si diletta a scrivere haiku: quante sillabe ci sono in «generatore elettrico»? Nove? Non ci starebbe neanche nel secondo verso.

If you are a professional writer—i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed—emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

I've searched for the path to God all my life— I know you have— —and now I've found it and I can't believe it. It feels like I'm sitting here, writing this to myself. You are.

And I know about psychologists, when they're writing down what you're saying they're really writing down how much money they're going to get when they sell their latest yacht, because they're all yuppies with no respect.…

Complaints about the demise of society and the "youth of today" also tend to be timeless. Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of medication- an investugation of my own life. It has nothing to do with I've got to get another play2

It's a type of frame control," Tyler Durden replied. A frame is an NLP term: It is the perspective through which one sees the world. Whoever's frame—or subjective reality—is the strongest tends to dominate an interaction. "Style has all these really subtle ways of keeping control of the frame and getting people to qualify themselves to him. He makes sure that the focus is always on him. I'm writing a post about it." "That's

A novel is a letter you write to someone you don't know.

As certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.

If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won't hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won't write anything that anyone will read a second time either.

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

The writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health.

Psaní dává lidskému životu urÃ…â"¢itou d?stojnost. I kdyby to nikdy nikdo ne?etl, aspo? nÄ›co dÄ›láte. Pracujete na té nejd?ležitÄ›jÅ¡í vÄ›ci... RozhodnÄ› je to lepÅ¡í než psát reklamní texty. Neutloukáte se aspo? v plytkostech. A máte Å¡anci pohovoÃ…â"¢it si s tÄ›mi, kteÃ…â"¢í se dosud nenarodili.

For a writer, a journey of a thousand miles begins in a library and ends at the typewriter.

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not . You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.