Writing Quotes

[Emil Miller]

I have just been looking at some quotations about writing and these are some of my favourites. Does anyone else have any favourite quotes?


Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. ~Flannery O'Connor

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. ~Author Unknown

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis

[Gregory Samsa]

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann.

"The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate." - François-René de Chateaubriand.

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found." - Alexander Pope.

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick *** and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page." - Stephen King.

[PeterL]

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. ~Don Marquis

Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling did that in two different ways. Maybe I should try it.

[hillwalker]

Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate has made many memorable quotes regarding poetry, but the best (which unfortunately I can't lay my hands on) says poetry is a lot like banging ones fist on the top of a television to make the picture come clearer.

H

[PrinceMyshkin]

trusting to memory here:

"A writer is someone who always fails." Graham Greene.

[MANICHAEAN]

Couple of my favourites:

Edward Gibbon

"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language."

W.Somerset Maugham

"We have long passed the Victorian era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby."

[L.M. The Third]

I just found something I would do well to remember.


Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

[MANICHAEAN]

Joseph Conrad.

"Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation. The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction."

[L.M. The Third]

Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

[MANICHAEAN]

G.K.Chesterton.

"Literature is a luxury. Fiction is a necessity."

[Crass the head]

Write what you like; there is no other rule. - O Henry

[ProxyLover]

"I write for the same reason I breathe- because if I didn't, I would die."
- Issac Asimov

[chipper]

i like writing... i get to live life twice - me

[chipper]

something i wrote after watching my first screenplay.

I expected a roller coaster ride but never the intensity of the twists and turns I encountered.

I proved that late night writing, ever-popular oftentimes doubted writers block, caffeine overload, eternal mood swings, anxiety attacks and instant fast food fascination are real and ever present. Those events were expected but there is always an after taste that I didn’t see coming. It is sometimes bad but often a discovery of me and of all these things, living and non-living and the spaces in between, around me.

It is surprising how one character can conveniently alter the structure of my world and then… watch another painfully destroy it. Those were heartaches.

There is also the possession… of things that are not real and so real. And the disappointment of losing them either by necessity or by perverted natural transition of things. No one warned me that it is more devastating to lose someone or something you never possessed.

The challenge to create something new… fresh… unexpected, whatever the **** that means, out of a clean sheet of paper. These are the moments that make you want to walk the world upside down or use a filter on your eyes or do things inside out.

It brings out the most insane ideas especially when there are conflicts that can’t be resolved or loose ends that need to be tied in the interest of creating a seamless exploration of emotions and events. High after high and a low just deep. In the end, the insane starts making sense… fitting in… settling down… until it creates a circle leading to the end.

The guarantee is that after all those, things become much more bearable and meaningful because I get to live twice and do life through the different me. Eventually, I survived it without making me neither too in love nor too indifferent because it forced me to choose my battles.

To those who helped me ink my first screenplay either by not giving a **** or by giving a part of you voluntarily or otherwise, thank you.

Thanks for the distraction. Inspiration. The lousy debates. Unneeded cigar breaks. Kulitan sessions. Planning the out of town trips that never happened (we always have next week, right?) Music trippin. Artworks. Eating. Metrowalk, Eastwood and Greenhills. Perpetual late coming. Singing through the bad times, keeping silence through the worse. Making memories in the car… I had fun even though shelling out the dough was just as hard as having a love life.

[Greta Kin]

"A writer is a reader moved to emulation." ~ Saul Bellow

[Melysnl]

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. Steinbeck

Everyone has talent, what is rare is to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. Erica Jong

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer. Margaret Atwood