Quotes about writ
writing perspective choices
The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story. Jeannette Walls
writing voice challenges
One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.
writing way publishing
Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing. Jennifer Gilmore
writing feels therapy
I really don't feel that writing is therapy.
writing used feels
I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers.
writing people cry
I don't write my music for Sony. I write it for the people who are screaming down the road crying to a full-blast stereo. Jeff Buckley
writing laughing cry
Time to write and sing, to laugh, to listen, to discover, to cry, to love music.
writing thinking psychology
I think the works of W.D. Gann and Robert Prechter have inspired me more than anyone else. It was from their writings that I discovered cycles, patterns, and psychology dominate the market, and that the news breaks with the cycles, not the other way around. Jeff Cooper
writing eye order
In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect. Jean-Paul Sartre
writing simple thinking
Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.
writing thinking long
I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.
writing past men
Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.
writing portraits myth
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
writing self inner-strength
When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears? Georges Bernanos
writing painting illusion
Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion. Georges Braque
writing ministers crosses
Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross. George Whitefield
writing joy nails
Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank. George Will
writing hints compliment
Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."
writing people political
Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.
writing people literature
When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written. George Saintsbury
writing men thinking
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
writing cutting liberty
We do not precisely enjoy liberty at the Figaro. M. de Latouche, our worthy director (ah! you should know the fellow), is always hanging over us, cutting, pruning, right or wrong, imposing upon us his whims, his aberrations, his fancies, and we have to write as he bids ... George Sand
writing obsession violent
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
writing passion tasks
I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.
writing effort important
I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714. George Saunders
writing given aspiration
I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.
writing trying fiction
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
writing normal energetic
I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.
writing doe looks
That's what a story must feel like to me. It's not, "I want to write about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and - boop! shovel. "Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body."
writing ideas challenges
I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.
writing thinking remember
Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.
writing have-faith tobias
As far as which writers embody this form of gentle power - Tobias Wolff, for sure. His persona and his writing both share an easy, capacious confidence that says he has faith in his readers.
writing needs produce
When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.