Writing Quotes - Page 45

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

I lived to write, and wrote to live.

There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.

It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

It was very unfortunate that Allah's Apostle was prevented from writing that statement for them because of their disagreement and noise.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

I firmly believe every book was meant to be written.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

Writing is not the lottery. New writers have to be realistic about what it takes to get published. But there is one similarity to the lottery: You have to play to win.