#writ

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#careers #writers #faith

Words are precious things meant to create, to imagine, to dream with. ↗

— Elizabeth Chandler

#writing #dreams

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#on-fiction #writing #dreams

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#writing #dreams

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer. When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse. ↗

— A. Saleh

#poetry #writer #writing #dreams

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#dreams

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired. ↗

— Harlan Ellison

#dreams

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#jack-kerouac #memory #vision #writer #writing

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#nightmare #torture #why #write #dreams

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#magic #neil-gaiman #words #writing #dreams