Writing-Advice Quotes

[columbusmatt]

I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.
--Isak Dinesen





(This seems like it would be a fun, instructive thread. Hope it's okay to have started another one!)

[skankityspence]

I think my favorite one has got to be this:
Write the book you want to read. - Chuck Palahniuk


He has an article of 13 writing tips - a very good read if you have the time.
13 Writing Tips from Chuck Palahniuk

[Debbie]

"If you have to say it, you're not telling your story"--Steve Bochco

[columbusmatt]

All of us can ask directions or remark that it looks like snow. When we wish to embody in language a complex of feelings or sensations or ideas, we fall into inarticulateness; attempting to speak, in the heat of love or argument, we say nothing or we say what we do not intend. Poets encounter inarticulateness as much as anybody, or maybe more: They are aware of the word’s inadequacy because they spend their lives struggling to say the unsayable. From time to time, in decades of devotion to their art, poets succeed in defeating the enemies of ignorance, deceit, and ugliness. The poets we honor most are those who—by studious imagination, by continuous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language—publish in their work the unsayable said. – Donald Hall

[columbusmatt]

"Poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination."


-- Derek Walcott

[Sal]

I think of this often, and try not to be an example proving it:

"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they are incapable of walking on foot." - Friedrich Nietzsche


and this one: "Just because you cried when you wrote it - doesn't make it true." (me)

[columbusmatt]

Mozart's response to a critic of his work:



“I am in the smallest room in my house. Your review is in front of me. Shortly, it will be behind me.”



Advice on how to take rejection!

[columbusmatt]

I just found another good one on Bill Ward's website:


. . . put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

--Stephen King

[Debbie]

"Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?'" — Connie Willis

[columbusmatt]

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
- Carl Sandburg