Modelled Writing Quotes

The world has gotten smaller and more accessible since I first started writing in the 70's. ~ Nelson DeMille

When people say, 'But what is acceptable in erotica?' I sometimes answer them by saying: there are certain taboos and limits in writing about sex as a positive, enjoyable, blissful, exciting activity. There are no taboos and limits whatsoever to describing the same sexual activities if they are traumatic, horrible, full of suffering and disgust. You can describe anything. ~ Senta Holland

In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never anything for themselves. Society and husbands praise them for it (when they get too miserable or have nervous breakdowns) though always a little perplexedly and half-heartedly and just to be consoling. The poor wives are reminded that that is just why wives are so splendid -- because they are so unselfish and self-sacrificing and that is the wonderful thing about them! But inwardly women know that something is wrong. They sense that if you are always doing something for others, like a servant or nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all. For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you have to be something yourself. [...]"If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say; 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights. ~ Brenda Ueland

Lead generation excels when a campaign is looking to capture a piece of factual intelligence that could never be modelled or predicted through profiling and sophisticated propensity algorithms. ~ Chris Cunningham

Have you ever tried to vent your frustration by writing down swear words? Try it, it's just not the same. ~ Frank Tayell

Love is what makes you do everything. It really does conquer all. With my first album, I was writing about empowerment hoping that would make it true. And now it is. I'm in charge. I make the rules. I've been writing since I was nine years old and I'm very much involved in the creative process. And now that I'm in a happier place in my personal life, I'm spitting songs out left and right. ~ Jessie James Decker

In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthy conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards and left nine out of ten artists neglected if not ignored. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Of course I want to be a best seller because I'm in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly. ~ David Lagercrantz

Blood-coloured bottlebrush trees and scarlet hibiscus looked too bright for this devastated world. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well. ~ Anne Waldman

You have seven writers in your basement?"
Donald nods, signing, "They like it here. There's a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer ... They don't usually make much trouble. ~ Susan Wiggs

Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. ~ David Mitchell

You meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you've been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: 'Write this down' ~ Carlos Santana

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers. ~ R.A. Salvatore

I'm a Texas girl, with a California soul. ~ Crystal Woods

Outside, I take in the fact that the night is deeply dusky and warm, and that feels like a balm after the cold air inside. I notice a strong smell from the glowing white roses that hang over the churchyard gate and the dark fluttering of bats that swarm from a high corner of the church tower. Around us, as we walk in the tired grass, gravestones whose cadaverous foundations have failed them lean against one another for support. I see a Celtic cross, the contours of lichen covered stone mounds, writing everywhere, words of remembrance, and, above us, the dark, pointed leaves of the yew tree greedily sucking away the last of the light. ~ Gilly Macmillan

There are three things that any scene in a book or short story can do: (1) It can advance the plot, (2) It can explain the background or backstory, or (3) It can deepen the characterization. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

My prose has no individual style as such, but is rather an unspoken and still unexpressed groping toward the personal. There is something there that wants to come out; something of my own that must be said. Yet, perhaps, words are not the way for me. ~ Neal Cassady

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion.
... I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything ... ~ Anna Comnena

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself. ~ Dave Grohl

Why I love these words
They are mine
You cannot change that
You cannot rearrange that
Try as you might
You cannot take away
All that they mean to me ~ Maddy Kobar

When I'm on a good go, I can do 12, 13 hours of writing. ~ Karin Slaughter

So many synapses,' Drisana said. 'Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.'
Danlo made a fist and asked, 'What do the synapses look like?'
'They're modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.' She didn't explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume's computer stored and imprinted language. 'The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses' natural evolution.'
Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. 'The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?'
'Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.'
'And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another's mind, yes?'
'Yes, Danlo.'
'And not just the learning – isn't this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?'
'Almost anything.'
'What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?'
'Certainly.'
'And nightmares?'
Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. 'No one would imprint a nightmare into another.'
'But it is possible, yes? ~ David Zindell

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together ... . - The Crack-Up ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It didn't take Celeste long to realize that this was going to be the sort of book club where the book was secondary to the proceedings. She felt a mild disappointment. She'd been looking forward to talking about the book. She'd even, embarrassingly, prepared for book club, like a good little lawyer, marking up a few pages with Post-it notes and writing a few pithy comments in the margins. ~ Liane Moriarty

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.

So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.

I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this. ~ Tupac Shakur

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience': They're talking to a single person all the time. ~ Robert Graves

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings. ~ Paul Haggis

Love is easy, and I love writing. ~ Ray Bradbury

Writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm doing my best. I read in the paper that I'm an action director. They always say that, "Action director Walter Hill", if they bother writing about me at all. I think that's fine. I'm happy to do the work. ~ Walter Hill

Like writing, publishing is not easy. No endeavor worth pursuing is. Discomfort and fear are easy outs - and ultimately dead ends. They are responses to keep us locked in the role of victim. Empowerment is encapsulated in the written word. Writing about trauma is more than simply documenting experience - it's about illuminating life on earth. It's about transforming tragedy into art, and hoping that somehow that piece of art may help someone else who's gone through something unbearable and who doesn't yet see that there is truly a light at the end of the tunnel. . . . It's about transcendence. It's about where we go from here." Tracy Strauss ~ Rossandra White

He's been spoiled 'til salt won't save him. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this. ~ Salman Rushdie

Autobiographia Literaria"
When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.
If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine! ~ Frank O'Hara

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself. ~ Anne Fadiman

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story. ~ Grant Heslov

By reading, we will know the minds of great soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough. ~ Andrea Seigel

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else. ~ Natalie Goldberg

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure. ~ Sara Sheridan

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy. ~ E.B. White

Hiresha felt something she struggled to describe. Power and possibility swirled within her, along with a a sense of gasping potential in each moment. When she could a find a name for it, tears beaded her eyes. I am awake. ~ A.E. Marling