#writ

On Writing About Nora Hawks I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women. ↗

— Dennis R. Miller

#female-characters #how-to-write #nora-hawks #on-writing #art

If you gotta scratch the itch, scratch it. Or, if you want to do away with the day job, scratch, itch or no! ↗

— Deb E. Howell

#writing #beauty

He didn't need a psychiatrist to point out that writing had its autoerotic side — you beat a typewriter instead of your meat, but both acts depended largely on quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched. ↗

— Stephen King

#art

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#writing #art

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ↗

— H.P. Lovecraft

#weird-tales #writing #attitude

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence. ↗

— N. Scott Momaday

#oral-tradition #writing #attitude

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#beauty

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. ↗

— Ann Patchett

#imagination #tea #writing #beauty

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason. ↗

— Andre Gide

#inspired #madness #only #reason #things

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. ↗

— Robert Cormier

#beauty