All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.”

“He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.You think?I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny’s Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex’s name and: The half-life of love is forever. You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don’t want to burn them or give up writing forever. It’s a start, you say to the room. That’s about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

“The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.”

“And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third time one leg, and B,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,The abstract battle is concretely fought.The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,And thus it physically guides the phraseToward faint daylight through the inky maze.But method A is agony! The brainIs soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the willCan interrupt, while the automatonIs taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.”

“I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.”

“My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.”

“Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)”

“I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that’s like gardening in the basement. I don’t publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue.”

“Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.”

“What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I’m concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I’ve never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.”

“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”

“The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river’s flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God… or an artist and a writer.”

“I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.”

“i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.”

“I think maybe today a poem I hopeafter breakfast I start tryingpulling it out of my own gutmostly by force”