All Quotes By Tag: Writing-life

“The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”

“The historian records, but the novelist creates.”

“There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.”

“The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.”

“I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.”

“Panic strikes me when I think about a sentence that isn’t given the chance to live because I don’t have a pen in my hand or am not sitting near enough to someone familiar to speak it to. Especially if it’s a particularly good sentence, a sentence with truth or beauty or humor or sadness to it. The best ones always take you by surprise. They sneak into your head while you’re walking down the aisles at a supermarket, or flat-out assault you when you’re at your grandmother’s funeral, and you have to scramble to give the thought life before it’s gone forever. Cocktail napkins, palms, text messages sent to yourself.”

“it’s been my experience that most writers don’t talk about their craft–they just do it”

“I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I’d be staring at a blank page forever.”

“From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: “There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.”

“Writing is the great invention of the world.”

“I’m writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.”

“Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.”

“Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it’s shit. Write some more. Repeat.”

“I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office’s waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.”

“When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.”