#process

To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else’s work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own. ↗

— Chris Stocking

#business

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#creative-process #writing #death

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny. ↗

— John Rember

#creative-writing #writing #writing-books #writing-life #courage

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. ↗

— Buckminster Fuller

#process #quality #design

The most important thing for anyone, I think, is to be engaged, whether you're an artist or a journalist is to be engaged in the process at some level. ↗

— Billy Bragg

#artist #engaged #i #i think #important

Creativity is bent freedom. ↗

— Jeremiah Laabs

#creative-process #creativity #freedom

Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives. ↗

— Joe Hill

#creative-process #creative-thinking #friendship #scrabble #wordplay

The blind audition process can be nerve-wracking. ↗

— Christina Aguilera

#blind #process

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it. ↗

— Anne McCaffrey

#felt #go #gut #hit #mean

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again. ↗

— John Gray

#also #applying #forgetting #hearing #learning