All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“May the key of inspiration unlock your dungeon of creativity”

“When you’re at odds with yourself, it’s hard to create. Sometimes the writing process is as easy as opening up the window and letting in the breeze. And sometimes it’s like chiseling away at a block of granite with a pencil.”

“Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read — something most important what I should not try to write.”

“Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days.”

“I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.”

“From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola”

“Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.”

“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide– a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.”

“One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art – the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer’s unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.”

“Stop talking about it and just WRITE!”

“Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.”

“Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(“Literature, Revolution, and Entropy”)”

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”

“Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.”