#writ

I'm working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn't possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I've tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there's nothing going on with football. ↗

— Gregg Easterbrook

#days #fall #football #going #i

I was never a quick writer, but composed with great care and efforts. ↗

— Joseph Haydn

#composed #efforts #great #i #never

I love the way folktale and fantasy tap into the roots of story telling. The paradox, for me, is that by moving a story into the fantastic we can actually bring it closer to the reader, not move it further away. It is more than an escape. When we read of the only daughter of a fisherman (or the third son of a woodcutter) in a fairy tale, we are all that character. That's the underlying pulse beat of such tales. Using the fantastic as a prism for the past, if done properly, removes the tale from distancing specificity. It can't just be read as unique to a time and place; it is universalized in interesting, powerful ways. When I wrote Tigana, about the way tyranny tries to erase identity in conquered peoples, the fantasy setting seems to have done exactly that: I'm asked in places ranging from Korea to Poland to Croatia to Quebec, "Were you writing about us?" I was. All of them. That is the point. The fantastic is a tool in the writer's arsenal, as potentially powerful as any there is, and any tool we have works to the benefit of the reader. (Author's Note) ↗

— Guy Gavriel Kay

#fantasy #folktale #writing #experience

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. ↗

— Suzanne Vega

#certain #civil #experience #follow #formalities

Every writer I know has trouble writing. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#i #know #trouble #writer #writing

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty. ↗

— Lillian Hellman

#costs #dramatic #failure #feel #form

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#down #nothing #sit #typewriter #writing

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#character #characters #create #living #novel

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#concept #could #history #humanity #without

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels. ↗

— Carl Hiaasen

#always #business #everything #how #i