There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.

~ Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman Criticism Writing

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Shannon L. Alder Authors Fiction Writers Writing

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.

~ Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick Art Novelists Writing

The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.

~ Jonathan D. Spence

Jonathan D. Spence Human Voice Speaking Writing

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.

~ John Bunyan

John Bunyan Author Books Writing

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

~ Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley Brains Science Fiction Smarts Writing

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)

~ Thomas Newkirk

Thomas Newkirk Attention Reading Writing

An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Shannon L. Alder Author Writer Writing

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.

~ Truman Capote

Truman Capote Books Creativity Writing

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....

~ Anna Comnena

Anna Comnena History Memory Writing

A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

~ Patty Smith

Patty Smith Children Writing

Lately the muse has been treating me like Ike treated Tina.

~ Quentin R. Bufogle

Quentin R. Bufogle Inspiration Tina Turner Writing

I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead. Remember that I'm often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (it's tempting to call this the stadium of writing). It has a something from nothing quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture (107).

~ Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey Writing

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

~ Beck

Beck Amnesia History Music Writing

Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.

~ Jonas Eriksson

Jonas Eriksson Humor Writing

As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.

~ Christina Westover

Christina Westover Art Christina Westover Creating Inspirational Ravi Shankar Writing

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

~ David Mitchell

David Mitchell Cloud Atlas Music Self Referential Writing

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay Author Publishing Writing

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it anything more than that is advertising.

~ Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Writing

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.

~ Sharon Delarose

Sharon Delarose Dog Dog Lover Dogs Life With Dogs Living With Dogs Writer Writers On Writing Writing

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

~ Paul Auster

Paul Auster Books Reading Words Writing

But 'why then publish?' There are no rewardsOf fame or profit when the world grows weary.I ask in turn why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.It occupies me to turn back regardsOn what I've seen or pondered, sad or cheery,And what I write I cast upon the streamTo swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.

~ George Gordon Byron

George Gordon Byron Writing

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Genre Fiction Science Fiction Writing

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!

~ C. Joybell C.

C. Joybell C. Books Essence Gist Precious Oil Reading Rose Oil Words Writers On Writing Writing Writing Books

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

~ Stephen King

Stephen King 2002 Critique Judgement Self Criticism Writing

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Fulton J. Sheen Teaching Writing

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!

~ Deena Metzger

Deena Metzger Opposite Writing

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

~ H.g. Wells

H.g. Wells Calligraphy Fonts Letters Literature Power Typeface Typography Words Writing

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

~ Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead Distraction Internet Technology Writing

An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

~ Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding Writing

Good writing is always new.

~ A.s. Byatt

A.s. Byatt Writing

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.

~ Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Journal Writing

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..

~ Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill Humor Writing

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Writing

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

~ Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson Humour Literature Writing

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

~ Vincent H. O'neil

Vincent H. O'neil Acting Directing Girlfriend Love Murder Mystery Playwriting Seduction Sex Theater Writing

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

~ Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Writing

(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest.

~ Celine Kiernan

Celine Kiernan Celine Kiernan Into The Grey Moorehawke Writing

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin Architecture Art Creativity Literature Music Painting Writing

Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

~ Sandra Brown

Sandra Brown Writing Writing Advice
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