Writing Quotes - Page 347

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

You cannot teach somebody to write a masterpiece, but you can certainly teach them how to improve their writing skills. And you can teach them that they can make their own voices more effective by being able to communicate more clearly and forcefully. It makes people feel more capable when they can write - for instance to make a request - of a politician - and when they are able to receive a reply.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

I'd love to write a country album with Adele.

There are people who assume that Christianity is about the afterlife and that our chief problem in this life is that we are sinners who need to be punished and the point of Jesus life is that he took our punishment so we can go to heaven. I write about the problems we get ourselves into by misunderstanding and limiting the way we think about our faith.

Writing your own blog platform is like roasting your own coffee: it's impractical and you probably shouldn't do it, but for people who really, truly care about it, it's worthwhile to them for their own personal priorities that sound crazy to everyone else. Well, I write my own blog platform and I roast my own coffee.

There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing... It's a Gap application.'

I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

You love writing; I hate it; and if I had a lover who expected a note from me every morning, I should certainly break with him. Let me beg you then not to measure my friendship by my writing.

I do get labeled as a guitar band, but the only reason is that's the instrument I know how to play. The guitar is serving the song I'm writing. But I'm learning how to play keyboard better now so that'll start serving the song as well; it'll be another flavor. I'm not going to switch it up with big, fat drum machine beats and real swoopy synths, but yeah...

I had always wanted to write a song called 'The Vicious Circle'. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there.

China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see it.

Is there a secret? Yes. Anaïs Nin and Pauline Réage and Anne Rampling and Erica Jong all knew it. E. L. James knows it. It is the secret behind all of our writing. And our reading. Arousal starts in the mind. And grows in the mind. The brain is the most erogenous zone in a woman’s body. That is our secret. And it is what we share.

If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.

Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

I never meant to be a sexual object for anyone but my husband. I never thought a picture of my body would be tacked up in men’s bathrooms. I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.