Browsing Quotes With Tag: writing (28)
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If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
Speaker: Dorothy ParkerPosted: 24 Dec 2014 at 9:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Speaker: Thomas MannPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 10:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Let the word stand on its own. If it is the right word, it will work without help. If it’s the wrong word, adding other words to it will just make it seem desperate.
Speaker: Thom MerrilinSource: A Memory of LightPosted: 11 May 2013 at 12:17 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule
Speaker: Stephen KingPosted: 23 Mar 2010 at 5:22 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
This story is equally or more about surfing. People are no more interesting than waves and mountains.
Speaker: Dave EggersSource: How We Are HungryPosted: 26 Nov 2009 at 8:50 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Speaker: Willa CatherSource: O Pioneers!Posted: 19 Nov 2009 at 9:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I thought about the way so many of my friends bitched about their parents; they all seemed to think they were destroying their lives. I never felt like that. My parents were undoubtedly crazy, but they never did anything except make my life better. I was their seventh and final child, and they did not need this. To this day, I never want them to know anything about my life that makes me seem like the horrible person I truly am. In fact, the thought of them reading this book keeps me awake at night. It makes me want to get drunk.
Speaker: Chuck KlostermanSource: Fargo Rock CityPosted: 08 Nov 2009 at 8:31 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.
Speaker: Henry JamesSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 1:17 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking around the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working; spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell, or he may be in the middle of one, and we hope it is joyful.
Speaker: Andre DubusSource: bird by birdPosted: 16 Aug 2009 at 1:02 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Speaker: Thomas MannPosted: 28 Nov 2008 at 1:20 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Asked for advice from someone in high school who wanted to be a writer, he said, “Do not follow advice that doesn’t make sense. I work from experience, what I know, my imagination. I see a wall with fictional people on one side and real people on the other. While I’m writing, the fictional people reach through the wall and borrow from the real people.”
Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 6:33 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You’ll know which to use if you know your character, and we’ll learn something about the speaker that will make him or her more vivid and interesting. The point is to let each character speak freely, without regard to what the Legion of decency or the Christian Ladies’ Reading Circle may approve of. To do otherwise would be cowardly as well as dishonest, and believe me, writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see… or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different. They are agents of the status quo. Not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.
Speaker: Stephen KingPosted: 25 Aug 2008 at 1:56 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate – four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them; in fact, you may be following such a program already. If you feel you need permission to do all the reading and writing your little heart desires, however, consider it hereby granted by yours truly.
Speaker: Stephen KingPosted: 25 Aug 2008 at 1:44 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day… fifty the day after that… and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions.
Speaker: Stephen KingPosted: 25 Aug 2008 at 1:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Oh, to hell with it. If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineup of the New York Yankees or the Houston Oilers, or what label “Hang On Sloopy” by The McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the difference between a gerund (verb form used as a noun) and a participle (verb form used as an adjective).
Speaker: Stephen KingPosted: 25 Aug 2008 at 1:37 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
Speaker: Stephen KingPosted: 25 Aug 2008 at 1:33 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing about.
Speaker: VoltairePosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 2:55 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Preparation is a prerequisite to inspiration. Inspiration will never elicit thoughts from an empty head. Study assiduously, striving to develop a creative mind.
Speaker: Matthew CowleyPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 1:42 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It has been said that every good teacher should be something of a pack rat, collecting poignant ideas and powerfully expressed sentiments from the sources he or she encounters day by day. Daily living, when viewed through the eyes of a teacher, is full of experiences that spring to life as stories, analogies, and illustrations when it is time to teach.
Speaker: Glen M. RoylancePosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 1:41 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Speaker: Ralph Waldo EmersonPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 8:15 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!