Mirror Writing Quotes

I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror. ~ Elaine Dundy

I wonder if I'll meet one person that knows enough people that can get me recognized as a writer. Oh I already have he lives in my mirror. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

I peered at his writing, but I could make nothing of it.
Then I saw why, and my soul chilled like marble.
His writing was running left to right. Not the words in reverse order, but the letter themselves. All of it. It was mirror writing- to be read by the Devil. ~ Theresa Breslin

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way. ~ Thomas Frank

If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls. ~ Susan Hill

In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance. ~ Franz Kafka

Writing is hard work. Attempting to write a decent story is friggin exhausting! ~ Veronica Purcell

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. People in business say that toner cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them
every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. ~ William Strunk Jr.

Your only real competition will always be the person in the mirror. ~ Peter Voogd

I am always writing a potpourri of music. I want to give the world escapism through the wonder of great music and to reach the masses. ~ Michael Jackson

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyone else could do this better than you can. ~ Brian Helgeland

A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind. ~ Paul Valery

As a performer, you can't just sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You have to write and develop projects for yourself, because casting people aren't always going to see you the way you want to be seen. Write a one-person show, shoot a short film, do plays, whatever - activity breeds activity. No one's interested in a stay-at-home actress. ~ Wendi McLendon-Covey

No one can learn to love by following a manual and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm. ~ Paulo Coelho

By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values. ~ Ayn Rand

Screenwriting is not an artform, it is a punishment from God. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Regarding social order, Francis Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. ~ Douglass North

Sometimes writing a sentence can be harder than serving one. ~ James Magnuson

It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don't have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story; it's about what goes on inside your mind and soul. ~ Etgar Keret

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines. ~ Roberto Bolano

I acknowledge my beauty and my flaws, I do my best to keep it one hundred with the woman in the mirror so making friends is actually easy. ~ Aeriel Miranda

Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer. ~ Harlan Coben

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice. ~ Steve Martin

I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen. ~ Louis Begley

I write all the time. The wonderful thing about having a cell phone is that if I get an idea, I knock it out and it's in my phone and I can transfer it to my computer and go into the studio and bring it up. ~ Ian Astbury

For any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; ~ William Shakespeare

[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail. ~ David McCullough

The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing engages social, economic, political, religious and other structures. These, however, are only indirect concerns of the present book, which treats rather the differences in 'mentality' between oral and writing cultures. ~ Walter J. Ong

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke. ~ John Hodgman

You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely. It's far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character's skin, and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into. ~ Anne Bernays

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place. ~ David Cook

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work - and each other. You're my friend? Don't pick up that pen! ~ Chila Woychik

Dean had just come from seeing his lawyer. That was the first time that I found out that he had consulted a lawyer. He wanted to tell me what he thought was going on, but he was writing it down as if my house was bugged. He acted like everything was bugged. ~ Fred F. Fielding

I have been received more warmly by Everton than I have by Liverpool. It is scandalous that I should have to write these things about the club that I helped build into what it is today. ~ Bill Shankly

I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror, the sort that a woman can carry in her purse; one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart. ~ Peter Altenberg

I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things. ~ Ralph Fiennes

I always look at my favourite photographs or favourite movies by James Bidgood or Sofia Coppola before I write my songs - they put me in the right frame of mind. ~ Charli XCX

What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone. ~ Erica Jong

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.' ~ Doris Lessing

I make two movies a year to take care of the butcher and the baker and the school fees. Then I try to write, but it's not that easy. Acting is what's easy. ~ David Niven

And you don't know this, but that girl? The one left outside of that school alone? She's sitting there writing about you. You have all the makings of a modern-day tragic hero, and she's never felt so compelled to explore somebody's story before… ~ J.M. Darhower

The only writer to whom you should compare yourself is the writer you were yesterday. ~ David Schlosser

If I believed people who told me you can't make a living as a writer, I wouldn't be making a living as a writer. ~ William Meikle

In Memory of My Feelings"

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons
and have murder in their heart!
though in winter
they are warm as roses, in the desert
taste of chilled anisette.
At times, withdrawn,
I rise into the cool skies
and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification
of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape,
speaks, but I do not hear him,
I'm too blue.
An elephant takes up his trumpet,
money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror
across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired."
One of me rushes
to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me
flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes,
and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips
are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust,
definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs
of earth.
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets,
a flaking moon drifting across the muddie ~ Frank O'Hara

Painters get up and paint. Writers get up and write. I like to get up and act. It's not a big deal. It makes me happy. ~ Samuel L. Jackson

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life ~ Carl Henegan

By the time I got writing 'Halcyon,' I was on a roll, and I realized I had so much to write about, I realized I had so much built up inside that I couldn't really alleviate before, and then all of a sudden it was like reservoir burst. ~ Ellie Goulding

If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy what you want. ~ David Ogilvy

Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write. ~ Diana Trilling

Equal marriage makes a huge impact, because people see gay people being allowed to be happy," he says. "And these events involve families – and not just families but caterers and florists and hotels. And all these people are forced to accept that here are two people who are in love and want to build a family together . . . But I'm not complacent. Progress can falter, and rights can be taken away, and people can be repressed again very easily. ~ Damian Barr