Writing Quotes - Page 51

I think my dyslexia was a vital part of my development because my inability to read and write meant that I had to find knowledge elsewhere so I looked to the cinema.

Those who tell you it's tough at the top have never been at the bottom.

I have only one loyalty - to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer.

The whole thing is this: If you don't use just basic grammar, if you don't get the language down, you're not going to have access to a tool that people use as a weapon against you. The only reason I was never taught to read and write was because it was easier for them to lead me. But the second I learned to read and write, I began to lead myself.

Long patience and application saturated with your heart's blood-you will either write or you will not-and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.

Practise, practise, practise writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

What shall I say of the gallantry with which these Marines have fought! Of the slopes of Hill 142; of the Mares Farm; of the Bois de Belleau and the Village of Bouresches stained with their blood, and not only taken away from the Germans in the full tide of their advance against the French, but held by my boys against counter attacks day after day and night after night. I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes.

Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective.

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

If it isn’t for the writing, we’ve got nothing. Writers are the most important people in Hollywood. And we must never let them know it.

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

Don't think and then write it down. Think on paper.

Experience as much as you can and absorb a lot of reality. Otherwise, your writing will have the force of a Wiffle ball.

Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, 'The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place...and it implies relations among differentiated positions.' I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.

What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Never throw up on an editor.