Writing Quotes - Page 186

I began writing as an experimental writer.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.

Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book he was born to write. And if you prefer your novels brazen, poignant and hilarious, as I do, you were born to read it. Like a great show, this will stay with you long after the last cymbal crash and power strum.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.

As a filmmaker‚ like any artist‚ when something affects me emotionally I think about it in those terms. It's my way of dealing with my thoughts‚ my fears and my hardships. I think the same can be said with any artist. For a musician‚ you're going to write a song about something that affects you emotionally.

I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness.

Asleep or awake, writing or reading, whatever you do, you must never be without the remembrance of God.

I ask you to write this deeply into your souls . . . the materialistic culture . . . is now on the way to its close.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that God is a very creative author, and He writes a different story for every person. No two lives or stories alike.

I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening...Would you plug in?

I think my writing is part of my ministry.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

It seems a pity, but I do not think that I can write more. For God's sake look after our people.