#writing

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well. ↗

— Henri Frederic Amiel

#affirming #draw #examine #into #look

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing. ↗

— David Leavitt

#bitter #childlike #exhausted #figure #having

You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking. ↗

— Wayne Kramer

#anyone #anything #anywhere #because #being

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning. ↗

— Sue Monk Kidd

#writing #age

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#internet #online-writing #social-networking #twitter #age

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

To be awarded a prize which takes its name from an illustrious Dutchman who at the same time was a great citizen of Europe and through his writings did so much to open up our modern world of sensibility and thought is indeed a most signal honour. ↗

— John G. D. Clark

#citizen #did #europe #great #his