#writ

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#life-and-living #life-lessons #writing-life #life

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#creative-process #fictional-universe #writing #life

I write so the endangered thoughts roaming naked and vulnerable through the misty jungles of my mind aren't slain by the guns of practical living. ↗

— Kim Krizan

#life #living #thoughts #vulnerable #write

Najveću vrijednost imaju neizreciva znanja, ali još uvijek se nadam, ako ispišem podosta toga, i ona će se nazrijeti negdje između redova. ↗

— Jasna Horvat

#knowledge #life #writing #life

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. ↗

— Lewis Carroll

#writing-books #writing-life #life

Some days being a writer consists of telling yourself you aren't insane, your characters are. ↗

— Nevea Lane

#writing-life #life

Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence. ↗

— Gao Xinjian

#writing-from-the-heart #writing-life #life

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong. ↗

— George Eliot

#writing-advice #life

Ronan was a national bad boy now, the wild boy who should not be left alone with virgin debutantes. Only, the world did not know it was Ronan who was the frightened virgin and Emily the drunken temptress on the night in question. He was beyond despair and had lost the will to live. He was a dead man walking, His heart and soul was ripped out of his chest. He would never get his decent girl now, his life was over. ↗

— Annette J. Dunlea

#annette-j-dunlea #irish-writer #life

No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. ↗

— Hilaire Belloc

#on-people-in-books #writing #life