All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.”

“In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life.”(Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)”

“The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.”

“Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.”

“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”

“Sure, it’s simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.”

“Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We’re not here to be comfortable—we’re here, really, to shake things up. That’s our job.”

“[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.”

“The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.”

“Fiction—good fiction, anyway—is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality’s ‘merely good enough’ to a vision of what is truly great……and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.”

“Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.”

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”

“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”