#writ

Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters. ↗

— Teresa Mummert

#reality #writing #writing-process #writing-process

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#creative-process #writing #writing-process

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle. ↗

— Mickey Spillane

#writing-craft #writing-process #writing-process

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer... ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#writing-process #writing-process

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#writing-process #writing-process

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. (Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935) ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#expectations #honesty #integrity #on-writing #pandering

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. ↗

— William Edgar Stafford

#poetry #thinking #writing #writing-process

Finally, after a glance at Notre Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a cafe on the Place de l'Opera and watched the people. They were amazing -- never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn't seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr. Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see the pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes. ↗

— Christopher Isherwood

#education

I first got into writing because I got involved in the production of a magazine for army wives. They were short of copy one day and the editor asked me to write a piece about being an army wife "and make it funny". Good at obeying orders I did as I was told, the piece was a success, I was asked to write a regular piece and slowly it ended up as a book. ↗

— Catherine Jones

#funny

To write good poems is the secret of brevity. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes #poems #poetry