#writing

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen. ↗

— Cameron Conaway

#fighting #martial-arts #open-mind #writing #art

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#authorship #truth #writing #art

Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. ↗

— Christian Bauman

#writer #writing #art

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#beautiful-chaos #creative-process #creativity #heartbreak #inspiration

A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious. ↗

— Christy Leigh Stewart

#writing #art

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#story #writing #age

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#dreams

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest. ↗

— John Berryman

#writing #courage

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#writers #writing #age

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#life