Quotes about writing
writing class people
There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. George Orwell
writing mind trying
A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
writing heart pennies
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?
writing order long
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.
writing wish doe
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
writing epic bigs
I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale. George R. R. Martin
writing want stories
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.
writing subconscious bounds
A lot of writing takes place in the subconscious, and it's bound to have an effect.
writing opportunity class
I was a journalism major, and I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction instead of term papers. Sometimes they’d say yes.
writing views giving
From where I sit, battles are hard. I've written my share. Sometimes I employ the private's viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That's vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general's point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.
writing successful thoughtful
All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.
writing character thinking
I don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]
writing thinking agony
I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?
writing impact advice
The best writing advice I had was [in] ‘Heinlein’s Rules for Writers’ by (American science fiction author) Robert A. Heinlein. His first rule is that you must write, and I was already doing that, but his second rule is, ‘You must finish what you write,’ and that had a big impact on me.
writing views knowing
Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.
writing fabulous inspired
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
writing ideas mind
Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important.
writing reality spirit
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality. Jean Cocteau
writing temptation poison
After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
writing knack painting
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
writing men thinking
A man of moderate Understanding, thinks he writes divinely: A man of good Understanding, thinks he writes reasonably. Jean de la Bruyere
writing truth-is
To express truth is to write naturally, forcibly, and delicately.
writing years two
There was about a two-year period at the end of the '60s, when I realized I was in the wrong place and entertaining the wrong people with the wrong material and that I was not being true to myself. I went through a metamorphosis into something more authentic for me, a more authentic stage voice and writing voice. George Carlin
writing people
More people write poetry than read it.
writing want rich
Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out. Gene Weingarten
writing vocabulary dancing
Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling. The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.
writing thinking aspiring-writers
The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.
writing glasses disease
It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass. Gene Tierney
writing sound kind
William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot. Gene Simmons
writing men mind
Wouldn't want to write the X-Men, and I suppose the X-Men is the ultimate Marvel comic, and I really wouldn't want to go anywhere near it at all, although on the other had I wouldn't mind having a crack at something like the Punisher. Garth Ennis
writing literature might
I don't necessarily write everything as automatically assuming it will be collected, there's nothing that says Hitman will be collected, though it might be.
writing hands tasks
I tend to forget what I'm doing will ever be read while I'm writing it, and just get on with the task at hand.
writing pleasure chapters
For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on. Garth Nix