All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Depression was my body’s way of grieving the loss of my childhood dreams. Writing was my imagination’s way of redefining them.”

“When it’s ‘Write Time’, it’s the right time!”

“Hard life… write more! Life sucks… write more! No matter what don’t stop. Keep to the grind and don’t let up. Somewhere out there is your ramp to success. Forget about the exits or the shortcuts along the way. Stay on the highway and when the ramp comes… take it and go!”

“My life went from “You don’t know My Story” to “Let me tell you my story” to “This is my Story” to “I didn’t chose this story” it’s only right that now that I’ve told my story, that you know that I am grateful for my story.”

“Writing in a new style never hurt anybody. Upside: if it does, you can write about it!”

“Stretch your writing muscles. Maybe the sophisticated technique nagging at you is something you’re just naturally good at. How else will you know?”

“Overuse at best is needless clutter; at worst, it creates the impression that the characters are overacting, emoting like silent film stars. Still, an adverb can be exactly what a sentence needs. They can add important intonation to dialogue, or subtly convey information.”

“Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled…in a unique and inimitable way.”

“A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.”

“Writer’s Block is just an excuse by people who don’t write for not writing.”

“Current “literature” [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.”

“How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of “authenticity” by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the “authenticity” of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for “authenticity” in such novels almost always ends up being “how much do the women suffer”, instead of – as might also be the case – “how sexist are the heroes”.And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can’t they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of “authenticity” is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer’s Book Review 4/18/2012 to “Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ”

“The hard part is putting one word after another.”

“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.”

“The cry that ‘fantasy is escapist’ compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are ‘escapist’ compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”