Quotes About Process

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

The first draft is always shit.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.

Write drunk; edit sober.

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Nu e mare lucru s? scrii. Nu faci decât s? stai jos în faÈ›a unei maÈ™ini de scris È™i s? sângerezi.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing … I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times….The first draft of anything is shit.

You are aware of the result, not the process.

if God refuses to mass-produce but insists on an intimate process that in the end forms each of us into the image of Christ, why would we choose a lesser path for our own lives? The work of the artist begins with the care of his or her own soul.

Discipleship...a process of unleashing the creative potential in each person.

Often we imagine that we will work hard...arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is a delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose. Happiness is not an objective. It is the movement of life itself, a process, an activity.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

The set of outline notes of our poorer sermons, however, will likely reveal that they were shaped by the nature of their substantive content, not by the process of the narrative experience that is anticipated.

Sometimes a sermon idea seemed to emerge on its own, possessed of its own power, and required a developmental process more akin to pruning than putting together.

All life changes the world, which is in a constant process of flux. Humans,

Unfortunately I'm one of those people who writes better when they're unhappy.

A story isn't what happens. It's how it happens.

Science isn't a book of explanations. It's a process. A process we're continuing to refine and make more precise. Despite setbacks and wrong turns, nobody has ever seriously said the problem with science was its demand for more precision and deeper understanding.

It might be unpalatable in our more egalitarian era to admit it, but Churchill became prime minister by a process that was far from democratic.

Professor Vellum had no aura at all. That was not a good sign. I began the treatment process by panicking.