#writing

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

I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever. ↗

— Patricia MacLachlan

#change

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere? ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#culture #power #society #systems #text

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235). ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#on-the-road #travel #travel-writing #change

One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away. ↗

— Alasdair Gray

#change #good #goodness #words #writing

Rituals help us change modes. ↗

— Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

#change

When I started writing I was a sick teenaged fuck inside who partly thought I was the new Marquis de Sade, a body doomed to communicate with Satan who was us- ing my sickness as his home away from home, and there’s your proof. ↗

— Dennis Cooper

#sickness #writing #communication

I can read lips. Especially if they have words tattooed on them. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#lips #mouth #reading #tattoo #words

A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren't quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them. ↗

— Criss Jami

#articulation #communication #controversy #disapproval #emotions

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone. ↗

— Richard Hugo

#writing #communication