Writing Quotes - Page 123

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

Earning money is not the sole objective of life or education. A community of any quality should have a whole range of skills and interests. They should paint, write, perform, visit art galleries and enjoy world-class concerts. Only then will they form a vibrant, rounded, interesting community.

I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

Education is not complete unless we teach our children not only how to read and write but the difference between right and wrong.

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.

You have to listen to your own voice. Not your heart, not your instincts, not any of that self-permissive psycho-babble stuff. No, none of that. If it was just about instincts and bright ideas it wouldn't need to be a voice. It's about words. You hear them, read them, then you write. But mostly read. Read the bloody poems.

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

It is no longer enough to simply read and write. Students must also become literate in the understanding of visual images. Our children must learn how to spot a stereotype, isolate a social cliche, and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from banter and important news from coverage.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.

Using adverbs is a mortal sin.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.

Time can't be managed. I merely manage activities. Each night, I write down on a sheet of paper a list of the things I have to accomplish the next day. And when I wake up ... I do them.

When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.

you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

We can carry the burden of hurt throughout our lives. We can make the hurt that we have experienced the defining aspect of our stories of ourselves. That means that somebody else gets to say who we are, somebody else gets to decide how we feel, and somebody else gets to decide how we see the world. Forgiveness not only frees us from the burden of someone else's opinion of us, but it allows us the opportunity to really write a story of ourselves that we can love, enjoy, relish, and live into.

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!