#writ

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#writers-on-writing #art

I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad. ↗

— Peter Davis

#expression #writers #art

An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that somebody considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source from the power of an unthinkable thought. ↗

— Charles Baxter

#art

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist. ↗

— Tracy Kidder

#writing #writing-process #art

My desk was a present from Margaret Atwood. After Zen and the Art of Uterus Maintenance sold its first million, she said I needed a place to write, other than the local bus-shelter. ↗

— Nuala Ní Chonchúir

#the-writer-s-room #art

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#beowulf #loss #poignant #regret #sorrow

Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book. ↗

— Irving Stone

#writing #art

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#writing #life

He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot... ↗

— John Gardner

#plot #setting #story #writer #writing

It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention. ↗

— Ted Dekker

#christian-fiction #creative-process #rapture-ready #writing #art