#writ

To Grandma, for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever received: “Christopher, I think you should wait until you’re done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer. ↗

— Chris Colfer

#dedications #on-writing #aspiration

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#love

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination. ↗

— Anthony Burgess

#j-g-ballard #literature #science-fiction #writing #imagination

But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#imagination

...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining. ↗

— Alasdair Gray

#writing #imagination

When I sit down to write I actually ask myself, 'Now, who do you want to be today?' ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#creativity #imagination #richelle #richelle-goodrich #writing

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. ↗

— Ted Hughes

#poetry #writing #imagination

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there. ↗

— Gertrude Stein

#interior-life #life-of-the-mind #writers #writing #imagination

I earn the magic of words by writing. I learn the myth of worlds by imagining. ↗

— Toba Beta

#magic #myth #writing #imagination

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#imagination #writing #writing-life #imagination