#writing

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be. ↗

— Patricia Hampl

#inspirational #writing #business

Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper on which it is written unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about. ↗

— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

#writing #business

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits. ↗

— Vincent H. O'Neil

#directing #murder #mystery #playwriting #theater

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story. ↗

— Alison Bechdel

#business

In every letter, in every line, she saw him. He hadn't changed - he'd only grown into the man he'd meant to be. ↗

— Diana Peterfreund

#love #romance #change

Being a professional writer is a lot like being a hooker. You'd better find out if you're any good at it before you start charging for it. ↗

— Sharyn McCrumb

#writing #death

It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it? ↗

— Carolyn See

#writing #experience

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: "Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out." And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#interest #teacher #understanding #writing #art

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying. ↗

— Petrarch

#writing #death

I don’t know why the publishers in New York don’t take a tip from Hollywood and just publish the outlines of novels rather than the completed books. Let the audience use their imaginations, as my Maw always says about radio. I would much prefer to read an outline of War and Peace than slog through eight hundred thousand words. Why do I need Tolstoy to describe snow? I can imagine snow, whether Russian snow or just regular snow. But book publishers seem to think that the authors should do all the work, and the readers should be waited on hand-and-foot like a buncha goddamn prima donnas. ↗

— Gary Reilly

#imagination