#writ

Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136) ↗

— Mark David Gerson

#filing #floors #fridges #returning-calls #toilets

Deferring judgement to a later date resolves nothing and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knick-knacks and odds and ends. Here a face. There a sunset. ↗

— Will Ferguson

#travel-writing #dating

This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account' should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#writing #dating

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#death

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer. ↗

— Candace Bushnell

#self-reminder #life

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#models #reading #style #writing #death

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination. ↗

— Louise Brooks

#on-writing #paraphrased #inspirational

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry? ↗

— Graham Greene

#work #writing #death

We inhabit a world so inundated with composite pictorial-verbal forms [...] and with the technology for the rapid, cheap production of words and images that nature itself threatens to become what it was in the Middle Ages: an encyclopedic illuminated book overlaid with ornamentation and marginal glosses, every object converted into an image with its proper label or signature ↗

— W.J.T. Mitchell

#writing #age

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#creative-process #writing #death