#writing

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer... ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#writing-process #writing-process

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#writing-process #writing-process

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. (Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935) ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#expectations #honesty #integrity #on-writing #pandering

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. ↗

— William Edgar Stafford

#poetry #thinking #writing #writing-process

Finally, after a glance at Notre Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a cafe on the Place de l'Opera and watched the people. They were amazing -- never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn't seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr. Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see the pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes. ↗

— Christopher Isherwood

#education

I first got into writing because I got involved in the production of a magazine for army wives. They were short of copy one day and the editor asked me to write a piece about being an army wife "and make it funny". Good at obeying orders I did as I was told, the piece was a success, I was asked to write a regular piece and slowly it ended up as a book. ↗

— Catherine Jones

#funny

To write good poems is the secret of brevity. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes #poems #poetry

From my writer's workshop, "Know when it's time to put everything you've got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it! ↗

— Heather Burch

#writing-advice

That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths. ↗

— Hélène Cixous

#home #truth #writing #home

hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#descriptive-writing #love-of-home #home