#writing

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#communication #humanity #writing #communication

It's not about you, it's about the story. It's not about the folks who raise an eyebrow because you're not yet published or not yet J.K. Rowling. It's not about what that lady at church may think or, for that matter, the critics. It's not about the fact that you can't please everyone, and it's sure as heck not about the odds. In the immortal words of Gold Five, "Stay on target." You may or may not be the one who destroys the Death Star. But you're a hero if you get out of your own way, put it all on the line, and try. ↗

— Cynthia Leitich Smith

#death

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. ↗

— Francis M. Nevins

#cornell-woolrich #doomed #hunted #hysteria #nightmarish

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void. ↗

— Graham Robb

#writing #change

A fiction writer is nothing more then the ambassador of an alternative world of their own design. Their success dwells in how many people their work entices to relocate ↗

— Carl Henegan

#design

How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word? 'Why is this so?' I demanded to know. ↗

— Theresa Breslin

#inquisition #learning #matteo #reading #sinistro-scribe

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#writers-on-writing #design

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny. ↗

— John Rember

#creative-writing #writing #writing-books #writing-life #courage

I have a real problem with bloat -- I write like fat ladies diet. ↗

— Stephen King

#writing #diet

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#magic #neil-gaiman #words #writing #dreams