#writing

(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. ↗

— Tom Wolfe

#writing #inspirational

Make evil intelligible, justice desirable, sorrow endurable, and love possible. My hero taught me that, and for once, I don't mean Batman. ↗

— Victor Giannini

#quotes-about-writing #victor-giannini #intelligence

In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? (“Mad House”) ↗

— Richard Matheson

#writing #intelligence

(Slap) “Owhhh … ” Raymond yelled as the Old Man’s cane hit his face. ↗

— Judy Byington

#badly-written-fiction #insult-to-intelligence #intelligence

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#writing #life

The main thing is to WRITE. Some days it might be 2000 words. Some days you might tinker with two sentences until you get them just right. Both days belong in the writing life. Some days you may watch a ‘Doctor Who’ marathon or become immersed in a book that is so good you can’t stop reading. Some days you may be in love or in mourning. Those days belong in the writing life, too. Live them without guilt. ↗

— L.K. Madigan

#life

In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#life

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#life

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#writing #writing-craft #writing-life #life

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us. ↗

— Alexandra Fuller

#writing #life