#craft

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#craft #fiction #reading #writing #art

Contrary to popular belief, people always say "It was a pleasure doing business with you". It is the only thing that has stayed with me after an assignment. Always mix business with pleasure. That is a secret they don't want you to know. BUT never mix pleasure with business. Then you might just end up in a divorce. ↗

— Nikhil Sharda

#writing-craft #business

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world. ↗

— James Baldwin

#poets #writing #change

We're not mad. We're inhabited ↗

— Sue Moorcroft

#romance #sue-moorcroft #writing-craft #love

[Dan] Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials. ↗

— Michael Coren

#the-burning-times #the-da-vinci-code #witchcraft #death

All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls. ↗

— Aporva Kala

#life

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#craft #literature #poetry #self-confidence #skill

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~ ↗

— Gore Vidal

#writing-craft #change

Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing. ↗

— T.L. Crain

#truth-inspirational #writing-craft #writing-from-the-heart #humor