#writers

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#course #dead #democracy #else #everything

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#aim #always #authenticity #bother #confuse

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#american culture #appreciation #artists #athletes #community

He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. ("Out Back") ↗

— Garry Douglas Kilworth

#writers #writing #writers-block

I have never experienced writers block and I've written every day since June 1972. But I have experienced the need to get up and walk around, eat ice cream, let ideas percolate, forget the story for a time, and then return to the page. Even the muse needs a vacation to rest up before she gives more of herself. ↗

— Jan Marquart

#write #write-to-heal #writers-block

I never get writer's block. My secret...I have purring cats in surround sound while I write...best white noise on the planet." R.Rose when asked how she deals with writer's block. ↗

— R. Rose

#fantasy #legacy-novel #paranormal #quotes #r-rose

The trouble with a baby, for writists, is that they take away your useful melancholy, even the energy to invent some. ↗

— D.A. Botta

#writers-block #writing #writist #writers-block

Yes, I felt very small. The typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more. -pg 237 ↗

— Albert Sánchez Piñol

#writers-block #writers-block

Maybe the real problem wasn’t that she had nothing to write about, but that she had too much. Maybe she wasn’t afraid of her finiteness after all, but rather Infinity and how it called her to begin somewhere, anywhere. To begin might be an acceptance that indeed she was some kind of creator, with tremendous powers. It might mean taking people’s lives into her hands–her own life, her friends’, even her father’s or mother’s. And maybe she was afraid they would think she had animated a wandering Frankenstein no one wanted to hold. ↗

— L.L. Barkat

#mary-shelley #writer-s-block #writing #writers-block

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions. ↗

— L.L. Barkat

#novel-writing #writers #writers-block #writing #writers-block