#writing

You’ve got to lick yourself into shape. Nobody can do it for you. The man who dreams of artistry, and yet thinks it is necessary for somebody else to lick him into shape, is a man whose art is doomed to be mediocre. Please believe me, this is not harshness on my part: it is the harshness of the nature of the game that I am exposing to you. If you are going to deliver the real goods, you’ve got to do your own licking into shape. ↗

— Jack London

#mentorship #writing #art

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer. ↗

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#arranging #bowl #crowded #day #flowers

Write visually or die! ↗

— Jim Steranko

#art

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit. ↗

— Marcus Speh

#humanity #short-story #writer #writing-life #art

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form. ↗

— Penelope Lively

#always #approach #characters #fiction #flexible

I honestly feel like we never had a bad episode by TV standards. Every week I felt there were so many strong components of the show, especially the writing. ↗

— Donal Logue

#components #episode #especially #every #feel

Rock is all about writing your own script; it's all about pioneering. ↗

— Courtney Love

#own #pioneering #rock #script #writing

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#architecture

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. ↗

— Bryan Magee

#basic #behind #curiosity #drive #interest

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act. ↗

— Margaret Mahy

#always #aspects #be different #because #being