#writing

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other. ↗

— Jane Austen

#writing #life

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. ↗

— Robert Hass

#robert-hass #writing #writing-craft #writing-life #life

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them. ↗

— Donald Miller

#purpose #stories #writing #life

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#lonely #writing #life

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane. ↗

— Jay-Z

#life

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#life

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#writers #writing #life

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it ↗

— Karl Popper

#end #finish #learning #letting-go #the-end

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer. ↗

— Sandra Brown

#writing-craft #writing-life #life