Quotes About Writing

But every line we write breathes victory and challenge, the bad temper of a conqueror, underground explosions, howls. We are a volcano. We vomit forth black smoke. The heavens open and out comes an imposing Pile of garbage; it looks a lot like Leo Tolstoy

Reading then is writing, in an endless movement of giving and receiving: each reading reinscribes something of a text; each reading reconstitutes the web it tries to decipher, but by adding another web. One must read in a text not only that which is visible and present but also the nontext of the text, the parentheses, the silences.

for Cixous, writing from the imaginary implies the invention of "other I's," the poet is more open to otherness. She follows the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate. Poetry, like other arts, questions and transforms ideology. … This is not to say that to create, one must be homosexual, but that there is no invention without other I's, no poetry, no fiction without that of a certain homosexuality, therefore of bisexuality.

Sometimes he used a spade in his garden, and sometimes he read and wrote. He had but one name for these two kinds of labor; he called them gardening. 'The Spirit is a garden,' said he

In the morning I write love letters and in the afternoon I dig graves

It had been written with one foot in the grave and a finger in heaven. These lines, falling one by one onto the paper, were what could be called soul drops. Who could these pages come from? Who could have written them? Cosette did not hesitate for a second. There was only one man it could have come from. Him!

Everything looked charming to him now. Never again would he read these books, write on this little white wooden table!

Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. The writer doubles and trebles the power of writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people.

Tantôt il bêchait la terre dans son jardin, tantôt il lisait et écrivait. Il n'avait qu'un mot pour ces deux sortes de travail, il appelait cela jardiner.

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

In rooms scented by dust, leather, and stone, she turns in the last of her father's dreams for her - that she will become a writer - she hands it in like an overdue book and takes joy in the words of others.

now, of all moments, at this time when her love for her children almost bowled her over and she thought, even in the midst of all this hardship and failure, I have raised good children. Kind, caring, loving people. "I'll write something," Elsa said. "Will you let us read it, Mommy?" Ant asked. "Maybe someday.

I know you have stuff you need to say, but we're kids so you stay quiet. I thought maybe writing it down would make you feel better.

To pick up a pen and write down her life, she'd have to remember it all, who she was, who she'd wanted to be. Those memories would be painful, both the good and the bad would wound her.

Tonight, later, she would write about her constant fear, how it strangled her all the time and the constant effort it took not to show it to her children.

out of her bag and slid it across the desk. "That's why I'm giving Noah this one opportunity to save his grade. If he'll fill this journal

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

Write. Publish. Repeat.

There are seven plots. Shakespeare wrote them better than anyone. If that scares you, leave now." If

I'm a writer. I just love telling stories." -Interview with Tasha Robinson, avclub.com February 14, 2001.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

The most terrifying thing about writing this book was how little I had to make up. Between actual historical power outages, government assessments of power grid vulnerabilities, and official estimates of the casualties that a long-term outage would generate, much of the book wrote itself. Having said that, things like the details of how attacks would best be carried out and specific locations of critical infrastructure have been purposely obscured or fictionalized.

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, the the best way would be to start his own religion.