Writing Quotes
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Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.
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Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.
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In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.
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From Finding the Center to Reading and Writing: A Personal Account, the story remains the same: in a journey unique to myself, I left my worthless home, with its small people, and I sailed against the tides of chance and history looking for a better place -- for the center -- where I suffered greatly and made myself into a great writer.
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Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.
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Writing has always helped me to make sense of difficult things.
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If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
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Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.
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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
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I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
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We need deliberately to call to mind the joys of our journey. Perhaps we should try to write down the blessings of one day. We might begin; we could never end; there are not pens or paper enough in all the world.
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I feel uninhibited when I'm writing.
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I'm more interested in moving toward writing stories - thinking about the graphic novel form, and just something more long-form. I did a lot of literary translation in college. Translation is an art. But for sure writing has always been a part of how I think through my ideas.
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I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.
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I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.
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I believe in strong legislation for the environment. So the only question is being smart enough and educated enough to scrutinize the people who are writing the legislation, because there are plenty of ulterior motives out there.
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The hope that they have legs. That's the biggest fear you always have creating new people. You love them, but then they kind of dissipate. Sometimes you don't get to write them as much as you'd like, like me and Harper Row.
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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
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No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.
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My publishers find me really challenging, as a lot of the time, I don't even know what I'm going to be writing about until I sit down to do it.
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I don't teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch - that's a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids - even when they're tired, even when they're bouncing off the walls.
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.
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When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
