#writers

I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer. ↗

— Patricia Hickman

#outer-banks #southern-fiction #southern-writers #inspirational

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off. ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#books #life #on-writing #philosophy #poetry

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#writing #life

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. ↗

— Joan Didion

#life

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays ↗

— Toni Morrison

#life

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion. ↗

— Roman Payne

#love #loving #metabolite #passion #payne

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own. ↗

— Haniel Long

#storytellers #writers #life

Writers are in many ways like demi-gods. With one stroke of a pen they can give life to a character, or strike them from existence, with nary a twinge of grief at their passing. ↗

— Steven Lake

#power #writers #life

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line. ↗

— Baby Halder

#bengali #india #memoir #women #women-writers

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. ↗

— Paul Gallico

#writing-advice #life