#writ

Please don't entertain for a moment the utterly mistaken idea that there is no drudgery in writing. There is a great deal of drudgery in even the most inspired, the most noble, the most distinguished writing. Read what the great ones have said about their jobs; how they never sit down to their work without a sigh of distress and never get up from it witout a sigh of relief. Do you imagine that your Muse is forever flamelike -- breathing the inspired word, the wonderful situation, the superb solution into your attentive ear? ... Believe me, my poor boy, if you wait for inspiration in our set-up, you'll wait for ever. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#inspiration #writing #death

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fathers #mortality #sons #writers #death

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. ↗

— Robert Lowell

#die #dull #gruesome #history #life

If I could just capture each memory in a bottle the maybe you people would understand how much I've suffered, how much I've been through, but most importantly how far I have come. ↗

— Tommy Tran

#hardships #inspirational #memory #suffering #tommy-tran

Nothing expresses Kafka’s innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of “writing as a form of prayer”: he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life. ↗

— Ernst Pawel

#kafka #life #writers #writing #death

Ideally, love is unconditional; practically, it is more often the opposite. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#blogger #inspirational #motivational #quotes #t-f-hodge

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see. ↗

— Henry Fielding

#fame #posterity #writing #death

Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again! ↗

— Dee Marie

#rejection #writing #dreams

we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are. ↗

— Tahereh Mafi

#writing-philosophy #writing-process #dreams

I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery" - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses) ↗

— Ahlam Mosteghanemi

#freedom-of-choice #women #women-s-strength #women-writers #dreams