All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”

“If we are exhorted to play simple melodies with beauty rather than difficult ones with error, the same should be applied to writing; simple words greater effect.”

“At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]”

“That’s being yourself. Chasing wherever inspiration goes, even if it’s radically different from the thing that people know you as.”

“It is the storyteller’s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”

“Good writing is always new.”

“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.”

“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.”

“He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.”

“Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don’t know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who’ll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..”

“The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.”

“Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fiction, no doubt, but I don’t think it’s necessary to come from such a background in order to write a good Bordertown tale. To me, “running away to Bordertown” is as much a metaphorical act as an actual one. These tales aren’t just for kids who have literally run away from home, but also for every kid, every person, who “runs away” from a difficult or constrictive past to build a different kind of life in some new place. Some of us “run away” to college . . . or we “run away” to a distant city or state . . . or we “run away” from a safe, secure career path to follow our passions or artistic muse. We “run away” from places we don’t belong, or from families we have never fit into. We “run away” to find ourselves, or to find others like ourselves, or to find a place where we finally truly belong. And that kind of “running away from home”—the everyday, metaphorical kind—can be just as hard, lonely, and disorienting as crossing the Nevernever to Bordertown . . . particularly when you’re in your teens, or early twenties, and your resources (both inner and outer) are still limited. I want to tell stories for young people who are making that journey, or contemplating making that journey. Stories in which friendship, community, and art is the “magic” that lights the way.(speaking about the Borderland series she “founded”)”

“That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.”

“Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.”

“You will learn more about writing from one hour of reading than you will in six hours of writing.”