#writing

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits. ↗

— Vincent H. O'Neil

#directing #murder #mystery #playwriting #theater

for a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes--because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare. ↗

— Hélène Cixous

#business

Contrary to popular belief, people always say "It was a pleasure doing business with you". It is the only thing that has stayed with me after an assignment. Always mix business with pleasure. That is a secret they don't want you to know. BUT never mix pleasure with business. Then you might just end up in a divorce. ↗

— Nikhil Sharda

#writing-craft #business

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story. ↗

— Alison Bechdel

#business

In every letter, in every line, she saw him. He hadn't changed - he'd only grown into the man he'd meant to be. ↗

— Diana Peterfreund

#love #romance #change

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

Being a professional writer is a lot like being a hooker. You'd better find out if you're any good at it before you start charging for it. ↗

— Sharyn McCrumb

#writing #death

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#dance #writing #imagination

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories. ↗

— Lord Dunsany

#imagination #memories #writing #imagination

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#short-stories #writing #love