#writing

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage. ↗

— Andrzej Wajda

#difficulty #even #film #given #good

Even when I think I'm writing really young, they say it's too mature. ↗

— Cynthia Weil

#i #i think #mature #really #say

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. ↗

— V.S. Naipaul

#writing-philosophy #inspirational

Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain. ↗

— James Wolcott

#believe #best #bring #collections #enjoy

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver. ↗

— Gene Wolfe

#be true #clearly #combat #every #experience

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation? Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute? ↗

— Dan Simmons

#charles-dickens #death #life #old-age #regret

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t. ↗

— Chris Dee

#love #storytelling #the-hero #writing #age

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. ↗

— Ben Marcus

#writing #age

He loved that she eschewed cursive for print, as he did. Cursive, more than anything, betrayed a person's age. ↗

— Sheri Holman

#age

Sometimes I just want to paint the words "It's my fault" across my forehead to save people the time of being pissed off at me. ↗

— Christina Westover

#anger #blame #burn #christina-westover #enemies