#writ

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#insight #life #writing #life

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#creative-writing #life #meaningless #meaninglessness #modern-life

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#life

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them. ↗

— Truman Capote

#life

The difference between a simpleton and an intelligent man, according to the man who is convinced that he is of the latter category, is that the former wholeheartedly accepts all things that he sees and hears while the latter never admits anything except after a most searching scrutiny. He imagines his intelligence to be a sieve of closely woven mesh through which nothing but the finest can pass.  ↗

— R.K. Narayan

#imagination

I'm sorry for the randomness of what I wrote, Mr. Oswald. There's been a lot to absorb.' Without looking up, he says, 'Never apologize for writing your truth, Mr. Fink. There are no right or wrong answers. ↗

— Wendy Mass

#writing #life

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. ↗

— Julia Cameron

#writers-on-writing #life

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#life

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. ↗

— Aberjhani

#contemporary-literature #contemporary-poetry #destiny #famous-poets #initiation

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day. ↗

— Robert Hass

#half #hour #life #take #time