Quotes About Writing

And I read. I write all day and read all night.

When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.

That's how I feel now, here in California, in my little house behind the big house. I have my list of approved players—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Harper Lee, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Shakespeare, King David.

I type that. I type the whole chapter and the one after that and the one after that. Do I have a plan? Am I taking notes? I'm working mindlessly, like a chimpanzee. I want Hemingway's stuff to sink into me by osmosis.

Friends sometimes ask, "Don't you get lonely sitting by yourself all day?" At first it seemed odd to hear myself answer No. Then I realized that I was not alone; I was in the book; I was with the characters. I was with my Self.

A Escrita é, no entanto, muito mais do que 'a pintura da voz' como queria Voltaire. Tornou-se a suprema ferramenta do conhecimento humano (ciência), agente cultural da sociedade (literatura), meio de expressão democrática e informação popular (a imprensa) e uma forma de arte em si (caligrafia), para mencionar apenas algumas manifestações.

I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after. It's about feeling, Camille had insisted. I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.

the script and heard the score

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

Elmore Leonard

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling betrayals of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

I sit in my new room and write everything down. My heart never stops talking.

I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

Is the library all you hoped?" "It's a holy of holies," I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

books The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits were narratives of my spiritual experience. I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing

Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don't grieve?

Write what's inside here, inside your holy of holies

A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn. xvii.

there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls.