#writer

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. ↗

— Robert Hass

#poetry #writers-on-writing #experience

Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers. ↗

— Jimmy Griffin

#acoustic guitar #bass #dorsey #fabulous #guitar

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house! ↗

— Nanci Griffith

#being #catch #else #good #hand

Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before. ↗

— Matt Groening

#before #beginning #characters #comments #done

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.' ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#anymore #because #classes #feel #glad

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there. ↗

— Anthony Trollope

#art #conceal #his #may #novel

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

— Joseph Haydn

#composed #efforts #great #i #never

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

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times. ↗

— Greg Egan

#been #directions #drags #fashionable #flying