#writ

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#life

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing? ↗

— Julian Barnes

#living #readers #writers #life

That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it. ↗

— Mario Vargas Llosa

#writer-quotes #life

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#authors #readers #writing #life

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#wilde #writing #life

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#child #childhood #encouragement #memoir #memories

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. ↗

— Charles Yu

#life #storytelling #truth #writing #life

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life. (Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935) ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#artists #falsification #gain #greed #honesty

Writing is such an industry now. In many ways, that's a good thing, in that it removes all the muse-like mystique and makes it a plain old job, accessible to everyone. But with industry comes jargon. I was aware that jargon was starting to fill those growing shelves of Writer's Self Help books, not to mention the blogosphere. Wherever I looked, the writing of a script was being reduced to A, B, C plots, Text and Subtext, Three Act Structure and blah, blah, blah. And I'd think, that's not what writing is! Writing's inside your head! It's thinking! It's every hour of the day, every day of your life, a constant storm of pictures and voices and sometimes, if you're very, very lucky, insight. ↗

— Russell T. Davies

#life

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#writing #life