#writing

Unfortunately, these days, 'literary' writing seems to have become synonymous with 'showy' writing, writing that is beautiful but doesn't tell a story. This is a misguided trend. If today's 'literary' writers would look back only one or two hundred years at real literary writers like Dostoyevsky, Poe, Conrad, Melville, they would find momentous stories--not just pretty writing--at the core of almost all of their great works. ↗

— Noah Lukeman

#literary-writing #pretty-writing #beauty

The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around. ↗

— Karen Russell

#beauty

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done. ↗

— Austin Kleon

#creative-work #creativity #writing #art

Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect. ↗

— Bryan Forbes

#writing #art

Submitting to history allows us to remember our society’s past. Although writing and art express history, it's our humanity which keeps all of us striving for an improved future. ↗

— K.P. Kollenborn

#history-of-mankind #humanity #writing-from-the-heart #art

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#the-fight #writing #art

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#authorship #schopenhauer #writing #art

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#fiction #novels #writing #art

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery. ↗

— Truman Capote

#creativity #writing #art

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#art