Quotes about writing
writing parent ifs
Write as if your parents are dead. Anne Lamott
writing giving goes-on
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
writing use want
You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.
writing being-positive stories
Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.
writing needs wake-up
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
writing artist editors
The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.
writing helping-others thinking
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
writing artist bricks
You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
writing being-the-best force
That thing you had to force yourself to do-the actual act of writing-turns out to be the best part.
writing sheep needs
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
writing way firsts
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
writing giving surprise
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.
writing thinking people
There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.
writing people able
Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know-people who are, in other words, not you.
writing giving looks
One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
writing voice effort
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
writing men important
We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
writing sheep needs
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
writing publication cracked
Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
writing should-have people
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
writing past emotional
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
writing giving people
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
writing night two
E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.
writing thinking people
I'd think of a topic and just rant on it and transfer it to the computer, upload it. It's such a quick thing. You post it on your website and after an hour, 10 people write comments. Andy Milonakis
writing pilots tvs
I'm going to write a whole pilot and see if anyone's interested, and if not then I'll just live out the tortured life instead of showing it on TV.
writing thinking play
I don't think that you can write music if you don't know how to play an instrument. You have to know the basics, then you can go forward. Alber Elbaz
writing thinking letters
I think that if you want to pass emotion, you have to write a letter. Emotions do not pass in SMS or in e-mail.
writing college lynching
By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching. Albert Maltz
writing directors comedy
You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies, and I couldn't find anybody to deliver it correctly. Albert Brooks
writing brain needs
If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit - if it's solving that part of your brain saying, 'I need to do this,' you've won.
writing magic want
If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.
writing novelists philosopher
Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments. Albert Camus
writing suffering today
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.