Writing Quotes - Page 38

I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers.

Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character.

The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well -- work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece -- suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.

No one put a gun to your head and ordered you to become a writer. One writes out of his own choice and must be prepared to take the rough spots along the road with a certain equanimity, though allowed some grinding of the teeth.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.

Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one’s thoughts

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

All writing is a process of elimination.

The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.

Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one's own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there.

The only way you can control people is to lie to them. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.

Whether you send an e-mail, tell your spouse in person, write a letter, talk over the phone, or write a quick note, remember that what you say today has the capacity to transform the countenance and the character of the most important person in your life, your spouse.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means - speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point; to accelerate revolutionary development.

Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you-and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.