#writing

The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it. ↗

— Bill Barich

#life

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. ↗

— John Updike

#life #writing #inspirational

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

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#fiction #pulp #writers #writing #life

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially. ↗

— Eric Maisel

#writing-life #life

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#writers #writing #life

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling. ↗

— Grace Bridges

#writing-life #life