All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, working for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed, and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”

“Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.”

“The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word – a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.”

“Good fiction writers have an instinctive understanding of human nature. That’s what makes stories and characters captivating. Good spiritual writers share what they sincerely practice themselves.”

“I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record — Le Sacre du Printemps — caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame.”

“Put the baby on the paper.”

“Anak-anak muda jaman sekarang itu lucu dan agak susah dimengerti. Mereka cukup bersemangat membuat berbagai macam proposal untuk kegiatan organisasi yang mereka ikuti. Tapi proposal hidup yang berisi visi dan strateginya meraih mimpi, justru lupa mereka buat sendiri.”

“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.”

“I always had plenty of ideas. I didn’t exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it. After a person, then a little corner of a place for the person to be in.”

“Nilai akhir dari proses pendidikan, sejatinya terrekapitulasi dari keberhasilannya menciptakan perubahan pada dirinya dan lingkungan. Itulah fungsi daripada pendidikan yang sesungguhnya.”

“It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.”

“Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.”

“The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.”

“The novel cannot submit to authority.”

“Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely “a writer” without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being “a woman of color who writes” ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who “happens to be” a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition.”