#writer

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running. ↗

— Gene Fowler

#i think #left #like #out #room

The writer studies literature, not the world. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#studies #world #writer

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#literature #reads #studies #will #world

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write. ↗

— Natalie Goldberg

#compassion #cow #detail #examination #experience

He asked if I was a songwriter, and I said yeah, that I was in town because I'd won this contest. He said, okay, then he was gonna play me his hit, and started singing 'When it's time to relax, one beer stands clear... ' ↗

— Arthur Godfrey

#because #beer #clear #contest #gonna

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease. ↗

— Oliver Goldsmith

#attaining #become #desire #ease #greatest

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

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

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is. ↗

— Taylor Hackford

#cast #contribution #director #film #fit

Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field. ↗

— Jane Haddam

#audience #conferences #conventions #field #fights