#writing

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life." (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009) ↗

— T.C. Boyle

#creative-process #self-confidence #self-trust #writing #life

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? ↗

— George Orwell

#writing #questions

Life's too short to be sat at home writing all the time. ↗

— Helen Hodgman

#life #life-s-too-short #writing #life

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#life

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#experience

Making Life means making trouble ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#pygmalion #life

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul. ↗

— Ignazio Silone

#re-writing #soul #writing #life

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story. ↗

— Michael Martone

#story #writing #life

I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny. ↗

— Emmuska Orczy

#chain-of-life #destiny #god #god-s-will #life

May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#life