#writers

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it! ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#creativity #failure #fantasy #impossible #writers

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#christianity #integrity #literature #writers #art

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#writers-on-writing #art

I have this rage that I can't explain. It's sad. ↗

— Peter Davis

#expression #writers #art

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#artist #catholic #writers #art

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#art-criticism #critics #insight #knowledge #music-criticism

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#creativity #fantasy #grotesque #irony #novel

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#beauty

[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#duty #virtues #writers #beauty

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences. Like vivid, rainbow metallic skin cells on the wings of a fragile butterfly, it is how you touch and reveal those inner parts of yourself, without damaging the psyche, that determines whether the beauty is experienced and expressed and shared with others or, in fact, becomes the death of the self and Soul and psyche. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me. ↗

— H. Raven Rose

#on-writing #powerful #self #soul #transformative