#writing

Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#writing-advice #life

A true book is like a net, and words are the mesh. The nature of the mesh matters relatively little. What matters is the live catch the fisherman draws up from the depths of the sea, the flashings of silver that we see gleam within the net. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#life

My most important goal as a romance writer is to satisfy readers by creating memorable characters, offering insights on life, and, most of all, touching hearts. I derive the greatest satisfaction when I hear from readers who have been genuinely moved by my books and/or who identify with the characters or situation. I also confess to reveling in the feeling I get when I type "The End" on a manuscript. ↗

— Laura Abbot

#life

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer. ↗

— Mo Yan

#writing-life #writing-process #life

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective." (Letter, April 19, 1951) ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#private-detective #realism #writing #life

You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I’m sorry, but they’ve all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t make it out alive either, so I’m sure as hell not going to go to them for advice. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#life #love #medea #petrarch #shakespeare

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. ↗

— Susan Cain

#writing-life #writing-process #life

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#duality #joseph-conrad #writing-craft #life

I feel the most alive when I write. ↗

— Kristy Brown

#life

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world. ↗

— E.B. White

#love