#roc

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#books #creative-process #creativity #editing #editing-humor

Maybe that’s what I have been looking for. When storms and rockslides threaten, I am looking for someone who will hold on to me and not let go. ↗

— Courtney Milan

#devotion #hold-on #love #never-let-go #rockslide

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start." (Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975) ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#dialogue #writing #paris

We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#masterpiece #pain #art

...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself... ↗

— John Geddes

#introspection #writer #writing-process #introspection

Use your intuition. Picture how things happen, why they happen. Don’t stick rigidly to first impressions, and once you’ve read the rule book, throw it away. Better still, burn the bastard. ↗

— Andrew Barrett

#procedural #thriller #thriller

The only 'ironclad rules' in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent. ↗

— Val Kovalin

#writing-craft #writing-process #grammar

And by the way, my belief is that if men were the ones getting pregnant, abortions would be easier to get than food poisoning in Moscow ↗

— Dennis Miller

#prochoice #food

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. ↗

— Patti Smith

#rock-and-roll #imagination

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers. ↗

— Angela Y. Davis

#denial #history #memory #slavery #imagination