Writing Quotes - Page 711

There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.

Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

Theodore Dreiser Should ought to write nicer.

Writing two stories [in the Thorn and the Blossom] about the same set of events that were complete stories in themselves, but also added up to a larger story. As I was writing them, I kept going back and forth, because something would happen in one story that would have to be reflected in the other story. And yet the same event would also have to be perceived in different ways by Brendan and Evelyn, because they are different people with their own interpretations.

Writing is an art like other arts. Dancers don't dance every once in a while. Musicians don't stop practicing. They are dedicated to what they do.

Delia Sherman once told me that you never learn to write a story. You only learn to write the story you are currently writing. You have to learn how to write the next story all over again. And she's absolutely right.

My uncommon sense told me to write this book [Turn and blossom], even though I was in the middle of making final revisions to my dissertation! Common sense would have said, finish the dissertation and get a good, solid academic position. But instead, I got to do something that no one else has done, because I don't think anyone has written a book quite like this one. And look at how beautiful it is!

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem when he was in his 80s about one day writing the book that would justify him. This was long after he had become one of the great masters, a writer everyone looks up to and reveres. As artists, I don't think we ever see ourselves as done. We always think we're at the beginning . . .

The editor, Stephen Segal, actually called me with the idea of creating an accordion book [ "The Thorn & The Blossom"], and asked if I could write a story for it. I was so intrigued! I immediately knew that it had to be a love story told from the points of view of the two main characters. Right away, I started working on a proposal. And once I had my main characters, Brendan and Evelyn, it was as though they started telling me their stories.

The appeal of writing a romance was that I'd never written one before the The Thorn and The Blossom.

I loved writing something people usually have - miscommunication, for example. Now that I've written a romance, I'm sure I'll write more: it's fascinating to put people together and see what happens, how they fall in love and what that means in their lives.

I loved writing something I'd never written before, and I wanted to write not just about "true love" but also a human relationship.

I'm used to writing fairy tales that can be somewhat dark, and the truth is that in fairy tales, romances are always problematic. They may end happily ever after, but someone's getting pushed into an oven or has blood in her shoe.

I co-edited an anthology called Interfictions with Delia Sherman and wrote a short scholarly book on three women poets called Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. So I've been busy, but I haven't had time to write a novel.

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

I much prefer to work with dead writers, and ones who were writing four hundred years ago.

One of the joys of writing music is making your own mark. Study other stuff, immerse yourself in music and then tell your own truth.

I've certainly collaborated with others for their songs and it's fun. To me, it's exciting to write from a place that doesn't have to be so true to my life and is more just storytelling.

In fact I wonder if I should bend my own rules a little and for the sake of writing a good song it doesn't have to been so autobiographical, but that's a stupid rule to live by as some of my favourite artists' songs, they have a song that you think is about their life [which] probably even isn't, but it's a great song.