Writing Quotes - Page 1117

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

I've always been a Batman fan, and I've always wanted to draw and write the sort of stories that I've always loved about Batman.

I think I'm enjoying writing for me.I know what's in my head, so there's a little less margin for error, but I think I really would like to write for an artist, and obviously it really depends on the artist, and the sort of story I would do.

Pay attention to the sound of words.

Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling.

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

So I think a writer should write what he loves, the people he relates to.

The way I personally work is I like to write what I know, what I feel, and also where I am.

For me, the existentialists are important critics of 'absolutist' claims, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are, at least in their later writings, also exponents of a doctrine of mystery: Being or the 'well-spring' of everything is, for Heidegger, ineffable, just as what Merleau-Ponty called 'Flesh' is for him.

Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.

I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

It's always like you write a poem when you can't really say what you're trying to say.

I also watch a lot of really bad television when I'm writing, "Like Dancing With the Stars," with my daughter.

I'm not reading currently because I'm getting revisions of a novel. If I read while I'm writing I will unconsciously plagiarize and go to jail.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.