Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

~ Zbigniew Herbert

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Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

~ Anne Carson

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You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

~ Anne Lamott

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Writing is a lifelong disease. Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.

~ J.r. Tompkins

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The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?

~ Hannah Harding

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He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn’t fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

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Write, what you feel about. Feel, what you have written about.

~ Austin Penman

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If God inspires your writing, others will know because it will inspire them when they read it.

~ Cecil Murphey

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Talking to oneself is a recognized means to learn, in fact, self-speak may be the seed concept behind human consciousness. Private conversation that we hold with ourselves might represent the preeminent means to provoke the speaker into thinking (a form of cognitive auto-stimulation), modify behavior, and perhaps even amend the functional architecture of the plastic human brain. Writing out our private talks with oneself enables a person to “see” what they think, a process that invites reflection, ongoing thoughtful discourse with the self, and refinement of our thinking patterns and beliefs. Internal sotto voice conversations with our private-self provide several advantages, but most people find it difficult to maintain self-speak for an extended period. Internal dialogue must compete with external distractions. Writing allows a person to resume a personal dialogue where they left off before interrupted by outside stimuli. A written disquisition also provides a permanent record that a person can examine, amend, supplement, update, or reject.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

~ Vivian Gornick

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...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

~ John Geddes

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Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

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You know how I say, ‘Don’t ask anyone how to get somewhere unless they have been there?’ Well, I have been there – I have written, been published, found success, and experienced self-doubt, frustration, anger and disappointment along the way … But you know what? I have not been to the place you’re going to. This is your journey. Your destination. Disregard everything in this book. Or embrace it. Better yet: cherry pick. It’s your life.

~ Catherine Deveny

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I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.

~ Gore Vidal

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It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human actions or behavior. It's the writer's fault if we don't believe in his characters as human beings.

~ Sōseki Natsume

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You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don’t embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That’s damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you’re alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers about the problems you are facing. Someone you know and trust. There is no shame in asking for help.

~ Bryant A. Loney

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Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

~ Abigail Thomas

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Today is the day that you create worlds, you change lives, you make a something, a someone, out of nothing.Today is the day you become a writer.

~ Alessandra Torre

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The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.

~ Don Roff

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As a writer: Aim toward becoming keen through a looking glass limn perspective on evoking pleasure of the senses with STRONG VERBS.

~ Jt Sanz

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If you do not want to be forgotten as soon as you are dead...be read, or try coming back and pull the feet of those who are still alive instead!

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

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The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.

~ Oliver Markus

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...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.

~ Stephen King

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Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

~ Roman Payne

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I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. … It’s like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It’s like, ‘Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just…I have to…It’s super important for my law!

~ Joss Whedon

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Replace your old books with the book you've always wanted to write.

~ Rob Bignell

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Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.

~ Rob Bignell

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Replace your old books with the books you’ve always wanted to write.

~ Rob Bignell

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Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat... That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!

~ Jim C. Hines

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Real writers write. Period. No, the muse does not come to visit everyday. She’s a lazy, precocious flirt. You cannot get into the habit of being “in the mood” to write. No writer on Earth is in the mood to write everyday, but the good ones do it anyway. They fight through their fatigue, their stress, their doubt, and they write. They get the words on the page. Period. So stop waiting for your muse. Trust me, she sleeps around.

~ Darynda Jones

Darynda Jones The Muse Writers Writing Craft

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone.

~ Shannon Celebi

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I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.

~ Christy Hall

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Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

~ Shannon Celebi

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Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days...it will demand absolutely everything of you.

~ Christy Hall

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When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete...you feel as if you could do anything.

~ Christy Hall

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Don't be afraid of what you're creating.

~ Christy Hall

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Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

~ Christy Hall

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I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

~ Brad Leithauser

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A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

~ Roman Payne

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