#writ

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#culture #film #music #writing #art

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#freedom #friends #writing #art

Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not. ↗

— S.A.R.K.

#creativity #dreaming #procrastination #writing #art

Art is not in some far-off place. ↗

— Lydia Davis

#creativity #writer-s-block #art

It is something to have gazed on the constellated white, felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love. It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous in the only ways we know how. ↗

— Bryana Johnson

#free-verse #hamlet #poetry-life #shakespeare #the-quintessence-of-dust

Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You’re giving a gift. You’re helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They’ll become real. ↗

— James Chartrand

#pain #writer #writing #love

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write? ↗

— Ann Patchett

#beauty

I love the word 'fantasy'... but I love it for the almost infinite room it gives an author to play: an infinite playroom, of a sort, in which the only boundaries are those of the imagination. I do not love it for the idea of commercial fantasy. Commercial fantasy, for good or for ill, tends to drag itself through already existing furrows, furrows dug by J. R. R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, leaving a world of stories behind it, excluding so much. There was so much fine fiction, fiction allowing free reign to the imagination of the author, beyond the shelves of genre. That was what we wanted to read. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#fantasy #writing #imagination

I said never mix business with pleasure. They said it was a pleasure doing business with me. ↗

— Nikhil Sharda

#humourous #puns #satire-write #business

My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes. ↗

— Wanda Lea Brayton

#poetry #writing #youth #love