Writing
Quotes - Write what should not be forgotten
“This
is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to
choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love
sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it
possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a
room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”
―
David Levithan, Every Day
“If
you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
―
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
“Writing
a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful
illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by
some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
―
George Orwell, Why I Write
“Perfectionism
is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you
cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and
a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief
that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you
won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of
people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better
than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
―
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
“I
love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human
emotions.”
―
James Michener
“When
Great Trees Fall
When
great trees fall,
rocks
on distant hills shudder,
lions
hunker down
in
tall grasses,
and
even elephants
lumber
after safety.
When
great trees fall
in forests,
small
things recoil into silence,
their
senses
eroded
beyond fear.
When
great souls die,
the
air around us becomes
light,
rare, sterile.
We
breathe, briefly.
Our
eyes, briefly,
see
with
a
hurtful clarity.
Our
memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws
on kind words
unsaid,
promised
walks
never
taken.
Great
souls die and
our
reality, bound to
them,
takes leave of us.
Our
souls,
dependent
upon their
nurture,
now
shrink, wizened.
Our
minds, formed
and
informed by their
radiance,
fall
away.
We are
not so much maddened
as
reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of
dark, cold
caves.
And
when great souls die,
after
a period peace blooms,
slowly
and always
irregularly.
Spaces fill
with
a kind of
soothing
electric vibration.
Our
senses, restored, never
to
be the same, whisper to us.
They
existed. They existed.
We
can be. Be and be
better.
For they existed.”
―
Maya Angelou
“A
woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her
judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means
signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will
refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
―
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“Fiction
is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread
out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
―
John Cheever
“The
good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The
bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
―
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Writing
is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you
a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it."
[Thoughts
from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]”
―
John Green
“You
know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really
get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing
tunic.”
―
Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is...
“Closed
in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is
missing out.”
―
Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
“Any
word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no
exceptions to this rule.”
―
Stephen King
“I've
got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains
to be seen.”
―
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“The
reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to
those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really
tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
―
Eleanor Roosevelt
“One
always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
―
Michael Cunningham
“You
don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks
lying in the road.”
―
Richard Price
“Which
of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is
more real than the person standing beside us?”
―
Cornelia Funke
“Everybody
does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
―
Christopher Hitchens
“There
comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write
another book or simply close it.”
―
Shannon L. Alder
“A
good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the
truth about its author.”
―
G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
“some
moments are nice, some are
nicer,
some are even worth
writing
about.”
―
Charles Bukowski, War All the Time: Poems 1981 - 1984
“You
always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending.”
―
Julia Quinn
“When
you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing,
irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at
the time. ”
―
Lady Gaga
“All
I need is a sheet of paper
and
something to write with, and then
I
can turn the world upside down.”
―
Friedrich Nietzsche
“In
writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
―
William Faulkner
“My
aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest
way.”
―
Ernest Hemingway
“We
can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
―
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
“Some
things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write
it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the
wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite
the way you want to.”
―
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
