#writing

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process. ↗

— Roald Dahl

#writing-process

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#writing-books

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#writing-books

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh. ↗

— Stephen King

#writing-books

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been. ↗

— Betty Smith

#writing #writing-books

Creative exhaustion is first cousin to writer’s block. First off, I try to accept that when it hits, I am not wasting time, but preparing myself to return to work. I blog more. I do something different, like answering this question. If I can’t force myself to finish a story, then perhaps it was not worth finishing. If I have to push rather than let it flow, it won’t be as good as if I take more time, mess around in the garden and try to shove the guilt deep into the compost pile. I am still a writer so long as I am thinking! ↗

— Sue Isle

#writers-block

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. ↗

— François Mauriac

#writer-s-block #writers #writers-on-writing #writing #writers-block

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ↗

— Wally Lamb

#writers-quotes

I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#censored #considerations #dream #dreams #economic

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#certainly #fiction #fiction writing #first #first of all