Ben Lerner Quotes
I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
Ben Lerner
Quotes to Explore
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
Walter Kirn
I'm basically a know-it-all, and I'm writing a book about it. I want it to be called 'Danson on Water' and have me on the cover in this Christlike pose, standing on the water.
Ted Danson
When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
Paolo Bacigalupi
I don't have specific music for when I'm writing. I'm usually listening to the same playlist or 'artist' before I arrive at the computer as when I'm walking somewhere after leaving the computer.
Tao Lin
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.
Ian Mcewan
Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.
Quentin Tarantino
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
Wally Lamb
I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.
Zach Braff
The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.
Garth Risk Hallberg
The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.
Patrick deWitt
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
Irvine Welsh
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
Edgar Allan Poe
While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.
Hakan Nesser
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Harold Pinter
All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
W. G. Sebald
I genuinely miss writing now on the rare days I don't write; my mouth waters when I think about writing, and I have an extreme physical reaction to the idea of doing it.
Caitlin Moran
Writing is like carrying a fetus.
Edna O'Brien
Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.
Barbara Cartland
Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.
Catharine MacKinnon
I have no unhappy memories of my childhood.
Louise Wilson
My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones.
Katharine Graham
I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
Ben Lerner
