#writing

DWIGHT: Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people. ↗

— Frank Miller

#sin

I write out of revenge. ↗

— William Goldman

#revenge

Most people keep their dreams to themselves, afraid to follow their hearts. Writers make their dreams a reality with each word, each line that flows from their pen. ↗

— C.K. Webb

#ck-webb #dreams #stories-dreams #writing #dreams

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#die

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#age

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#being

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#canon #literature #writing #art

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined. ↗

— Charles Nodier

#fantastic #fantasy #genre #horror #supernatural

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities. ↗

— Glen Duncan

#art

he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species. ↗

— Machado de Assis

#creativity #literature #novels #writers #writing