Writing Quotes - Page 536

I think writing comics is predicated on being a fan - there's no either/or. I'd argue I'm an even bigger fan now than when I started because I know how the hot dogs get made. And I kinda always saw the moving parts. I think I appreciate the good ones more now that I realize how lousy the production process can be, how hard it can be, and how easily something good can get crushed in its cogs.

Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.

Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.

I like to feel that every day or most days, I do a little bit of writing. I am a creature of habit in terms of the way I live.

Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

I get up early and open my emails, write cheques and answer the phone; whatever needs to be done.

As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.

Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

I had no agenda in writing this play except expressing myself. . . . It later occurred to me that I was not only announcing things to my family; I was announcing it to the world. Of course, if the play had been a flop, only my family would have known.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.

You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

You'll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That's when you know you're a writer - when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.

I certainly wasn't born with creative writing. Maybe there's a certain amount of learning and then it's up to the person. I think in the end it's your favourite books that are the best teachers. That's the way I've learned the most, by far.

Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.

When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence.