All Quotes By Tag: Writing
“To a farmer dirt is not a waste, it is wealth.”
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“Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.”
“Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.”
“I swear that girl was born with a pen in her hand, the moon in her hair and stars in her soul.”
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“A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful”
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“You must be a myth that your lover can’t graspand you must chase the moon like a wolf in the night, as if it will show you something only you can understand. Everything you do is a ritual that can mean something more and you must connect and create bonds with the spirits both outer and inner. Seek the strange and mysterious, otherworldly explanations for yourself and things around. There is always more. Always more.Nothing is ordinary,and you must make love to him like his touch is your salvation.You must dare to love and lose and hear your heart break into a million little pieces, glittering like diamonds in the night.Don’t run into hiding when the rain hits us like planets shot down to see who wants to survivethe mostfor you want to survive the mostand you must not hide from madness.You must love and live and write like you’re obsessed and possessed. Go mad for what you believe in.”
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“Writing is dreaming with your eyes open — and your heart on fire.”
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Don Roff “The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal.”
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“For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.”
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“Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.”
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“My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now – it seems I’ve learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.”
“I,” I’ll type. And that will be enough.Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I’m not a terrible poet. At least I’m not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of me.”
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“…prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm.”
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“I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall…And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.”
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