#writing

the writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off. ↗

— Keith Miller

#business

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street. ↗

— Martin Amis

#novels #writing #business

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#business

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#writing #life

To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else’s work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own. ↗

— Chris Stocking

#business

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well ↗

— Agatha Christie

#change

I write like I make love: alone in my bathtub, as I let the fantasy overflow and wash over me.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#change

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do. ↗

— Cameron Conaway

#life #stories #writing #change

A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddle with a book, changing little thing after little thing. ↗

— Kimberly Pauley

#change

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past. ↗

— J.L. Carr

#business