#writers

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

Write, write, write! Get your you-know-what in the chair and write more books: write the books of your heart and don’t let stress steal your joy. ↗

— Sarra Cannon

#writers #writers-on-writing #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

I do not love men: I love what devours them. ↗

— André Gide

#life #mankind #writers #life

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more. ↗

— Malcolm Cowley

#conversation #future-plans #lost-generation #modest #new-york

Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#change #reality #writers #change

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. ↗

— Howard Barker

#because #enlighten #me #secret #secrets

Then the light changed the water, until all about them the woods in the rising wind seemed to grow taller and blow inward together and suddenly turn dark. The rain struck heavily. A huge tail seemed to lash through the air and the river broke in a wound of silver. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#mississippi-authors #mississippi-writers #the-wide-net #change