#writing

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#writing #life

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged. ↗

— Koren Zailckas

#emotions #families #family #family-therapy #memoir

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing. ↗

— Hélène Cixous

#writing #life

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#writing-advice #writing-craft #writing-life #writing-process #life

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza! ↗

— Roman Payne

#ibiza #libraries #lifestyle #literary #literary-life

Writing starts with living. —Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing ↗

— L.L. Barkat

#writing-advice #writing-life #writing-process #life

How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?". ↗

— Shubham Choudhary

#fact #writing-life #life

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#writing-advice #humor

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#expectations #ideals #inspirational #inspirational-life #inspirational-living

I should be writing ... ↗

— Mur Lafferty

#writers-on-writing #writing-craft #writing-life #life