Writing Quotes - Page 250

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?

Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story ... The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Write what you love and love what you write.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year

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.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

I never thought of having platinum albums and winning awards. I just wanted to write songs and sing when I started out in the music business.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

If anything, I hope being an artist opens up more opportunities 'cause I feel there's a lot of things I could do, like musically and stylistic-wise that I can write, but I don't really have an avenue to show it 'cause most of the things I'm writing are in Hip Hop.

Some people, like Leonard Cohen, write one album every 10 years, and labor over a song for five years at a time.

I have finally perfected my signature. It took hours of practicing I decided early on just to write Pippa, not Middleton.

Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

Write letters to your grandmother. She will love it. And leave you money in her will.

Couldn't you see me and you stretched out in a bikini on the beach in Tahiti? See, me, I'm very selective even though I could be greedy; My main objective is to write our names together in graffiti.

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. The ordinary world of work is closed to him - and that if he's lucky!