Writing Quotes - Page 369

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision.

I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.

Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down. . . .The writing is superb.

I don't really think of time off as writing blocks. I think that's a western notion of demonizing inactivity. When your imagination decides it needs to take a nap. maybe that's what it needs to do.

It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

My writing, like everything I do, comes profoundly from my heart. I believe that if you follow your heart you will be successful in one way or another. Old-fashioned as that might sound, the philosophy is true.

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.

As for discipline—it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

You cross a border and the policeman or the frontier policeman look at you, What are you doing here? Why are you coming? How long will you stay? Well, if I had nearly enough years, I would write a novel about being a refugee.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

Some stories are true that never happened.

It is crazy even to ask what creativity is. It would be just as useful to interview a caraway plant in your garden and ask: "How did you decided to be a spice?"

I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I think I sit down to the typewriter when it's time to sit down to the typewriter. That isn't to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and half of my well-wishers, that there's no work involved. It is hard work, and one is doing all the work oneself.

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

I would recognise myself in each of his translations and he would feel betrayed and annoyed whenever I didn't write something the way he would have. A part of me died with him, a part of him lives with me.

Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her - to that lady called Reality.