Writing Quotes - Page 66

My Master... Say all you wish of me. It does not matter to me:Shallow.. Stupid.. Crazy.. Simple minded. It does not concern me anymore. For whoever writes about her concerns. in the logic of Men is called a stupid woman. and didn't I tell you in the beginning that I am a stupid woman?

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

In short, I will preach it [the Word], teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.

The angels laugh at old Karl. They laugh at him because he tries to grasp the truth about God in a book of Dogmatics. They laugh at the fact that volume follows volume, and each is thicker than the previous ones. As they laugh, they say to one another, ‘Look! Here he comes now with his little pushcart full of volumes of the Dogmatics!’—and they laugh about the persons who write so much about Karl Barth instead of writing about the things he is trying to write about. Truly, the angels laugh.

The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.

In the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

I'm sure someone out there has a workable solution. But what do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz. I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.

I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

Write the story that only you can write.

A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Isn't one of your first exercises in learning how to communicate to write a description of how to tie your shoelaces? The point being that it's basically impossible to use text to show that

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

I've learned this, that haters wanna hate. You could sing a song perfectly, you could write the songs perfectly, and some people are absolutely going to hate you.