#writ

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#nothing

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#perception

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#canon #literature #writing #art

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined. ↗

— Charles Nodier

#fantastic #fantasy #genre #horror #supernatural

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities. ↗

— Glen Duncan

#art

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species. ↗

— Machado de Assis

#creativity #literature #novels #writers #writing

Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#language #metaphor #writing #art

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society. ↗

— Kayla Rae Whitaker

#writing #writing-life #art

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'" (One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.) ↗

— David Halberstam

#basketball #david-halberstam #julius-erving #professionalism #sports

The thing I write will be the thing I write. ↗

— Steve Shilstone

#quote #writing #baseball