#writ

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. ↗

— Steven Millhauser

#writer #writing #art

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#writing #art

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art. ↗

— William Faulkner

#morality #writing #art

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#writing #art

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#been #close #done #ever #everything

Here's another test. Of any activity you do, aks yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it? ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#writing #art

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen. ↗

— Cameron Conaway

#fighting #martial-arts #open-mind #writing #art

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#authorship #truth #writing #art

Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. ↗

— Christian Bauman

#writer #writing #art

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#beautiful-chaos #creative-process #creativity #heartbreak #inspiration