Writing Quotes - Page 477

Changing writing styles is like an actor taking on a different part.

If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish - that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.

People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.

This is why very often you find educated people in the media who look at spiritual books but they are so identified with their thought process, they don't get it. They write reviews or articles and they miss the whole point. They can't see the essence. It's not their fault; it's not them personally. It's the human condition and its mind-identified state. And intelligence in itself doesn't help. You can have two or three Ph.D.s; it doesn't get you any closer to spiritual realization. In fact, you might be more distant.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Planning to write is not writing.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the young writer may steer his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.

The core of character lies in each individual story person's ability to care about something; to feel implicitly or explicitly that something is important.

You have a huge number of people who spend their time writing papers which show that migrants pay more to the country than they take out in benefits, and they say, "Why don't you approve of migration? Why don't you open up borders?" They're not able to empathize with how people feel about migration.

I had to be happy with the process of writing.Each step you take is more rewarding than the one before.

I took time in the day to write as much of the book as I possibly could. I didn't write too much at night, because I don't like to - I'd rather watch TV.

I love writing, directing and photography; if I could figure out a way to put the three things together, that's what I would love to do.

It's not like I'm not writing great music anymore, it's just that I want to take it another level.

Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.

Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing.

I have been writing JavaScript for 8 years now, and I have never once found need to use an uber function. The super idea is fairly important in the classical pattern, but it appears to be unnecessary in the prototypal and functional patterns. I now see my early attempts to support the classical model in JavaScript as a mistake.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.