#writ

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else. A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth. (“Mad House”) ↗

— Richard Matheson

#career #creativity #writers #writing #age

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#internet #online-writing #social-networking #twitter #age

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#story #writing #age

Make a written list of everything you love. ↗

— Rhonda Byrne

#list #love #make #written #you

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#dreams

Every writer is a writer of the generation before. ↗

— Wilfrid Sheed

#every #generation #writer

I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading. ↗

— John Zorn

#been #changing #doing #getting #i

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest. ↗

— John Berryman

#writing #courage

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. ↗

— Paul Celan

#basic #between #cannot #difference #hands

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before. ↗

— Nicolas Chamfort

#before #books #day #most #overnight