Life Of A Writer Quotes

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the "gift" of not belonging. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with! ~ Philip Roth

My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do. ~ Ken Scott

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer. ~ Charles Bukowski

What reader or dreamer doesn't imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the time to read? ~ Rawi Hage

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. ~ Roald Dahl

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it. ~ Gabrielle Roy

I love the village in my computer. There's little validation in the day-to-day life of a writer; sometimes we ache for a connection. ~ Lisa Unger

But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It's a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form.
Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it's that private perpetual struggle.
Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are. ~ Steve Almond

I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. [ ... :] Somehow I made my own pain a kind of god. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Sahib, a bamboo doesn't flower, but usually when it does it dies. So I am metaphorical to this plant. Last night, I flowered. In the morning I died. I am not being guilty or unhappy regarding the occurrence sahib. I am in ecstasy. I never bloomed in my life, I did once and that was my last. What died is the desire to be alive in spite of repetition of events like I used
to, the strength to drink my sorrows and search happiness elsewhere not in you. We are bound by the rules of society, and I am a woman of morals. We both know things between us have changed and being around you would simply make no sense practically. ~ Ranjani Ramachandran

In the past I was a vicious hunter. I would stalk my prey with pinpoint accuracy. Ever since Monica came into my life I've abstained from the game. It almost feels strange to stand here and look to the crowd knowing I could pick one and f*ck them into oblivion. I won't though. I may love her, but that isn't the reason. If I were to pick someone for the sake of revenge sex then I'm giving control to Monica and Dalton for betraying me. I'm strong enough to wait. A good hunter is always patient and never stalks in anger.'
'I always crack it until Tobias stops flinching at the sound. It's never the same amount of times. I don't want it to become obvious so I always do it a few more times to create a sense of surprise.
I coil up the leather and with the flick of my wrist I set a perfect line against Monica's back. She yelps in pain and surprise, and Tobias joins her. He thought he'd get the first blow.
I breathe through the pounding in my cock. It beats in time with my rapidly beating heart.
I flick my wrist again taking Monica across the shoulder. I see Tobias tense as she screams. Mustn't allow the slaves to think they are taking even turns. The blow's shock is what makes my cock burn for release. I palm my balls as they tighten, threatening to shoot my release up the stock of my dick. I inhale through my nose and breathe out my mouth until I regain my control.
I flick my wrist again and hit Monica across her thighs. She screams bloody murder at the ceil ~ Erica Chilson

It was as though each of us - in separate and distinct ways - had been plunged back into the past. Fragments of old memories were coming back at unexpected moments... Old ghosts awoke, stirred angrily into life by this girl, like a wasp's nest struck with a stick. ~ Karen Perry

If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government, ~ Peter Singer

your back had been mangled by the factory, mangled by the life you were forced to live, by the life that wasn't yours, that wasn't yours because you never got to live a life of your own, because you lived on the outskirts of your life - because of all that you stayed at home, and usually they were the ones who came over. ~ Édouard Louis

Living myth is about the experience of the waters parting again in the here and now. As a critical moment opens before us the spirit of life and genius of the soul speaks to us and through us. What was about to crush us suddenly parts before us and we shoot forward with the sudden vitality of life, fueled by the living imagination needed to survive. ~ Michael Meade

Money might be a reward (by-product) but should not always be the only goal of your efforts and enterprise. ~ Archibald Marwizi

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key
as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away. ~ Saul Bellow

Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh - I really think that requires SPIRIT. ~ Jean Webster

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me. ~ John Niven

J.J. and I came from a world where success was measured by how many degrees you had. J.J.'s employees came from a world where it was measured by the size of your subwoofer. ~ Paul Jury

I give you this charge, that you shall be of my Privy Council and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgement I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the State, and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best: and, if you shall know anything necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only and assure yourself I will not fail to keep taciturnity therein. And therefore herewith I charge you.
Administering the oath of office to William Cecil as Secretary of State, November 20, 1558, as quoted in Elizabeth I: The Word of a Prince, A Life from Contemporary Documents, by Maria Perry, Chapter V, Section: To make a good account to Almighty God ~ Elizabeth I

Poetry is more than a form of art. It's a vibration and a pulsing heart. Whether it's sour or whether it's sweet. It can give you strength no one can defeat ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Even if I have a good day, I still am aware of other people that are going through really hard, tumultuous things. I don't want to be the person who has a platform and neglects the things I see in my life and experiences. ~ Christian Scott

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death ...
... (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such."
But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war).
The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions. ~ Daniel Tammet

To love, or to have loved, - this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfilment ~ Victor Hugo

I grew up in low-income areas and I've seen people take negative energy and just accept it. They give into and end up living a pretty rough life. At a young age, I just knew I wasn't going to give in because I didn't want to end up being one of those people in the neighborhood that didn't have anything and lived a hard life. ~ LaMarcus Aldridge

Aelfric once told me that strong passionate loves always destroy themselves. They are kindled of a fire that burns so hot that no amount of fuel can sustain it. Those loves, Aelfric said, either dwindle with contact - unable to burn bright through the dreary intercourse of daily life - or suffocate with distance. Only a small and steady flame, he said, can last a lifetime. Though I haven't loved before now, I've found it to be true of other passions. Those who fall headlong into obsessions do so often, and always quickly move on to new obsessions. ~ Scott Davis Howard

The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to "Thou shalt not steal." Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God's name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore. ~ Stephen King

Too many people base their worth and value on what other people think of them. They worry if others like them, approve of them, or think of them as important. Because of such insecurities, they are constantly playing up to others, trying to win their favor and to meet others' every expectation.
When you do that, you set yourself up to be controlled and manipulated. You allow others to put you in a box. Some people do not follow their dreams because they are so concerned about falling from the good grace of others. You may lose the approval of others if you follow your own dreams. But if your friends approve of you only when you meet their expectations, they aren't true friends. They are manipulators. They are controllers.
There is a real freedom when you realize you don't need the approval of others. You have almighty God's approval. Don't try to keep everyone around you happy. Some people don't even want to be happy. You've got to be secure enough to say, "I love you, but I won't allow you to control me. You may not give me your blessing, but that's okay. I have God's blessing. And I'm not a people pleaser; I'm a God pleaser."
Take charge of your life. If you're being manipulated and pressured into being someone you are not, it's not the other person's fault, it's your own fault. You control your destiny. You can be nice. You can be respectful. But do not allow anyone to make you feel guilty for being your own person.
Life is too short to spend it trying ~ Joel Osteen

Life, and you, and I, and all of us together became for a while interesing to ourselves once more. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The best Armour of Old Age is a well spent life preceding it; a Life employed in the Pursuit of useful Knowledge, in honourable Actions and the Practice of Virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his Youth, will in Age reap the happiest Fruits of them; not only because these never leave a Man, not even in the extremest Old Age; but because a Conscience bearing Witness that our Life was well-spent, together with the Remembrance of past good Actions, yields an unspeakable Comfort to the Soul ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels."

"I hope so."

"Ah, you think they are good, they cannot be good, there is no good, the tendency to evil is overwhelming. One has only to think of the horrors of sex, its violence, its cruelty, its filthy vulgarity, its descent into bestial degradation. You had better go and dream in your monastery."

"Would you come and visit me there?"

"Of course not. I do not visit. Only, unfortunately, am sometimes visited."

"You don't want to discuss - you know - what happened? My priest said - "

"No."

"I care about how you are, I love you."

"You still fail to realise how this sort of talk sickens me. Now please go. This will do for a welcome home scene. Tell them not to come. I desire to be left alone. ~ Iris Murdoch

The best part (or maybe the worst) of loving you is... that I never have any plan to stop.
Because I don't want to reach the end. Too afraid to catch the finish line.
Let me do it slowly, wobbly, as if I'm decrepit.
Because, by doing that, I have many years to go, never ending days to come... enough time... to stuck... with you.
Helplessly addicted, stupidly enraptured... by you.

I love you this way, and will keep loving you this way.
So come... wear your white gown... because there is a ring, waiting for your finger.
A vow, waiting for your mouth to say it out.
A man... waiting for you... to make a commitment to spend every tomorrow... together. Go hand in hand, to any kind of future we maybe have.

Let's be happy. Let me... to make you happy.
Come, marry me, and I will show you what kind of life you will get by laying down your happiness on my hand.
I will be thankful for every second, and I will make you feel the same.
Come, marry me. Because I want to make you my wife, and me, your husband.
Come, start it, and then end it. With me.... ~ Yuli Pritania

I felt a rush of trust
felt that life might be not just tolerable but beautiful, if I could only remember to find the bare Present. ~ David James Duncan

Accepting Uncle Tom's Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff. They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o'-nine-tails with which they beat them to death, and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage.
Especially did she resent this in view of the enormous increase in mulatto babies in Atlanta since the Yankee soldiers had settled in the town. ~ Margaret Mitchell

The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes. In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests. ~ Herbert Croly

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction. ~ William Gibson

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Seven years ago, in my first semester at college, the professors handed out MacBook Pros. With mine, I filmed a seven-minute tutorial on 'natural makeup' - just me, my laptop, and a cup of coffee. When, a week later, it clocked 40,000 Web views, I knew people were connecting with it, so I kept going. That moment changed my life. ~ Michelle Phan

The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria. ~ A. N. Wilson

You are very quiet," Archer remarked as they walked together to the refreshment table. They'd just finished a game of whist and when Rose begged off from a second round, Grey's brother did the same.
"My apologies," she replied. "I do not mean to be rude."
"My brother doesn't deserve to take up so much room in that lovely head of yours."
She might have been insulted by his disparaging Grey, or his familiarity with her, had she not been so surprised by the remark itself.
"You are impertinent, sir."
He grinned-a grin so much more roguish than Grey's. "One of my more charming traits. I did not mean offense, dear lady. Only that thinking about him will do you no good. The man is bent on punishing himself for the rest of his life."
Rose accepted the plate he offered her. "Thank you. Why would he wish to punish himself?"
"Because he's an ar…idiot. Sandwich?" He held up a cucumber sandwich caught in silver tongs.
"Please. I'm not certain I wish to discuss your brother with you, Lord Archer."
"Not even if I can help you win him?"
Rose's heart froze-no, it simply stopped. Her entire body went numb. She would have dropped her plate had Archer not swept it from her hand into his own.
"What makes you think I wish to win him?"
He flashed her a coy glance. "Please, lady Rose. I've not made a career out of studying your sex to fall for your false innocence now."
Oh dear God. Had Grey told him?
"I've seen the way you look a ~ Kathryn Smith

Death: Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom. ~ Terry Pratchett

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...
Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Its not possible to do the wrong thing. You do what you do and you experience the consequences of what you do. If you do not experience this before you doe, your soul creates a new life so that you can. This is reincarnation. Eventually, you treat people as you would like to be treated. ~ Gary Zukav

It's normally agreed that the question "How are you?" doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, "A bit early to say." (If it's the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, "I seem to have cancer today.") Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of "life" when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body. But it's not really possible to adopt a stance of "Don't ask, don't tell," either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don't really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thin ~ Christopher Hitchens

Maybe we too are living like dead people. We move about life in our own corpse because we are not touching life in depth. We live a kind of artificial life, with lots of plans, lots of worries and anger. Never are we able to establish ourselves in the here and now and live our lives deeply. We have to wake up! We have to make it possible for the moment of awareness to manifest. This is the practice that will save us - this is the revolution. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him. ~ Osamu Dazai

Children need to see that they are part of a history and that the story of their family is a living thing. God tells it, a new story in each generation, and each must hold hands across the sea of time, joining together the ones who went before and the ones who come after. It is given from above. Little do we understand this in the beginning, but time teaches us many things we did not expect to learn. That is life. It is the same everywhere. ~ Michael D. O'Brien

Buffett's methodology was straightforward, and in that sense 'simple.' It was not simple in the sense of being easy to execute. Valuing companies such as Coca-Cola took a wisdom forged by years of experience; even then, there was a highly subjective element. A Berkshire stockholder once complained that there were no more franchises like Coca-Cola left. Munger tartly rebuked him. 'Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well two or three times, will make your family rich for life? ~ Roger Lowenstein

When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes ~ Ana Castillo