Pen Quotes

I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen. ~ Joshua Ferris

You ask me to write you a poem,
I pen you an empty ocean,
You run away.
You ask me who I am,
I paint you a breaking sky,
You weep in the rain. ~ Jenim Dibie

From the life's pen
My ink flows and my feelings pour
Some call it poetry
I call it my boat's oar… ~ Neelam Saxena Chandra

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation. ~ Jane Gardam

Waiting for the pen to dry up so he can start fresh with thoughts that are worth new ink. ~ Brian Andreas

My lord?"
Nick turned at the tentative, feminine voice, to find two young women standing nearby, watching him eagerly. Nick spoke, wary.
"Yes? "
"We - " one of them began to speak, then stopped, uncertain. The other nudged her toward him.
"Yes?"
"We are fans."
Nick blinked. "Of?"
"Of yours."
"Of mine."
"Indeed!" The second girl smiled broadly and stepped closer, holding out what looked suspiciously like -
Nick swore under his breath.
"Would you be willing to autograph our magazine? "
Nick held up a hand. "I would, girls, but you've got the wrong brother." He pointed to Gabriel. "That is Lord Nicholas."
Rock snorted as the two shifted their attention to the Marquess of Ralston, a dazzlingly handsome copy of their prey, and tittered their excitement.
Gabriel instantly eased into his role, turning a brilliant smile on the girls. "I would be happy to autograph your magazine." He took the journal and the pen they proffered and said, "You know, I must confess, this is the first time I've ever drawn the attention of ladies when in the company of my brother. Ralston has always been considered the more handsome of us."
"No!" the girls protested.
Nick rolled his eyes.
"Indeed. Ask anyone. They'll tell you it's the marquess who is the best specimen. Surely you've heard that." He looked up at them with a winning smile. "You can admit it, girls. My feelings shan't be hurt."
Gabriel h ~ Sarah MacLean

A scholar's weapon is his pen;
a sage's weapon, his deeds. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

If everyone took his pen and wrote just anything that came on his mind, we would greatly help researchers to understand how our minds work ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages. ~ Kate Morton

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? ~ Anthony Trollope

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned. ~ Grace Paley

I swear that girl was born with a pen in her hand, the moon in her hair and stars in her soul. ~ Melody Lee

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too. ~ Susan Hill

Never leave a pen around me - it will be gone. ~ Reem Acra

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

A girl should never stop thinking. ~ Lauren DeStefano

You wrote this right?" he said. "It tells how to defeat Set."
Thoth unfolded the papyrus pages. "Oh, dear. I hate reading my old work. Look at this sentence. I'd never write it that way now." He patted his lab coat pockets. "Red pen - does anyone have one?"
Isis chafed against my willpower, insisting that we blast some sense into Thoth. One fireball, she pleaded. Just one enormous magical fireball?
I couldn't say I was tempted, but I kept her under control.
"Since when does drool make you powerful? ~ Rick Riordan

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am often asked why I use a variety of pen names. The answer is that this way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books. ~ Jayne Ann Krentz

Give me a paper and pen, so I can write about my life of sin. A couple of bottles of gin, in case I don't get in. ~ Tupac Shakur

Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back. ~ Josiah Stamp

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen. ~ Paul Simon

Your problem, it is not here' - he pointed the pen at Max-Ernest's throat - 'it is here' - he pointed the pen at Max-Ernest's chest. 'My heart is heavy, too. But you must be strong. This situation, it is very serious. It is not only Cass's life that is at stake. If she dies, the Secret, it will die too. ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

There is an Islamic population in France, most of which comes from the North African countries. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

I'm just a woman with a dream, and a pen. ~ Sai Marie Johnson

So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief. ~ John Fante

No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had ~ Samuel Johnson

She twirled a pen in her fingers a second, giving me a I've-got-something-to-tell-you-but-I-don't-know-how-to-say-it look. Clearly, she wasn't used to doing this sort of thing. ~ Haruki Murakami

Their silent wounds have speech
More eloquent than men;
Their tones can deeper reach
Than human voice or pen. ~ William Robert Woodman

I have this clutter of questions all churned together in my mind and they won't stop churning. I've found out too much and not enough. there are too many pieces that could go together too many ways and I can't stop shifting them around. There has to be some way it all makes sense and it doesn't yet."
"You're asking a lot of life if you want it to make sense."
Most of the time, Joliffe was of the same opinion, but he shook his head against it now like against a fly's buzz and said nothing, frowning at the pen he was still twirling.
Basset watched him a moment, then said,
"Well, if you can't let it go, go at it as if you were trying to make a story of all these pieces you have. Shift them around and fill the gaps until they make the sense you want. ~ Margaret Frazer

I am a creature of the Fey
Prepare to give your soul away
My spell is passion and it is art
My song can bind a human heart
And if you chance to know my face
My hold shall be your last embrace.

I shall be thy lover...

I am unlike a mortal lass
From dreams of longing I have passed
I came upon your lonely cries
Revealed beauty to your eyes
So shun the world that you have known
And spend your nights within my own.

I shall be thy lover...

You shall be known by other men
For your great works of voice and pen
Yet inspiration has a cost
For with me know your soul is lost
I'll take your passion and your skill
I'll take your young life quicker still.

I shall be thy lover...

Through the kisses that I give
I draw from you that I will live
And though you think this weakness grand
The touch of death your lover's hand
Your will to live has come too late
Come to my arms and love this fate

I shall be thy lover...

I am a creature of the Fey
Prepare to give your soul away
My spell is passion and it is art
My song can bind a human heart
And if you chance to know my face
My hold shall be your last embrace. ~ Heather Alexander

A well-wielded pen is a woman's best weapon. ~ Kiersten White

When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook. ~ Kevin Barry

The pen isn't really the weapon - the work ethic is the weapon. ~ Lemon Andersen

Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin' For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'. ~ Bob Dylan

Charles Sumner; A Smacking breeze has sprung up, and we shall part this company soon; and then for the Atlantic! Farewell then, my friends, my pursuits, my home, my country! Each bellying wave on its rough crest carries me away. The rocking vessel impedes my pen. And now, as my head begins slightly to reel, my imagination entertains the glorious prospects before me ... ~ David McCullough

When people starts to enjoy a writer's pen, he becomes a legend even if his stories are neither long nor publicly surrounded by expectations. ~ A. Saleh

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then what is the laptop? A light saber or a life saver? ~ K.S. Collier

So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote. ~ Henry Adams

I always have a Sharpie, because usually when someone asks me for an autograph, they don't have a pen. I carry one in my purse, as well as in my tennis bag. ~ Maria Sharapova

In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone. ~ Natalie Goldberg

But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play. ~ Alan Bennett

If he [the Artist] were to take up the pen it would be ... to better express his individuality and explain it to others; or else to put his internal affairs in order ... to deepen and sharpen his relationship with his fellow men because other souls exert an immense and creative influence on our soul; or to try to fight for a world as he would like it to be, for a world that is indispensable to his life. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

Both light and shadow are the dance of Love.
Love has no cause, it is the astrolabe of God's secrets.
Lover and loving are inseparable and timeless.
Although I may try to describe love,
when I experience it, I am speechless.
Although I may try to write about love, I am rendered helpless.
My pen breaks, and the paper slips away
at the ineffable place where lover loving and loved are one.
Every moment is made glorious by the light of Love. ~ Rumi

Set an intention to heal any unexpressed anger that may be present in your life. Go to a quiet place with pen and paper. Take a few deep breaths. Ask your anger to speak to you. Write down the thoughts and feelings. When you are finished, forgive yourself for holding on to the anger for so long. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

She wanted to write about something other then love. Yet her freethinking pen seemed more adhered to her heart then to her head. A battle she never felt worth fighting. ~ Coco J. Ginger

When that little clock on my wall says "Olaotan! Olaotan!! Olaotan!!! It's half past time to write", I only have three things at my disposal: A pen, A piece of paper, and a crowded mind. ~ Olaotan Fawehinmi

Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares. ~ Charles Yu

As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen. ~ Patti Smith

Only my characters truly know what's going on - I just hold the pen. ~ Sandra J. Jackson

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out. ~ H.L. Mencken

When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again. ~ Regina Brett

The incessant driving of the pen over paper causes intense fatigue of the hand and the whole arm because of the continuous ... strain on the muscles and tendons. ~ Bernardino Ramazzini

When the ink runs dry, you're most likely writing at the wrong angle. ~ Carolyn Shields

Author:
A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape with wanton disregard. His days are spent picking up all the stray free words he can handle and squirreling them away for later use.
Subsequently, (days, months or years later) working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.
Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit. ~ Leopold Throckmorton

My main objective was to interrogate people. I never killed anyone with my own hands. If I hadn't been there, someone else would have taken my place. But it was me: I had a pen, I made notes, I tried to write impartial reports to submit to my superiors, but they wanted confessions that led to more arrests. I sacrificed everything for the Revolution, and back then I believed in what I was doing. I was proud at the time. But as I look back now, it makes me shudder. The fact that I killed more than twelve thousand people makes me feel ashamed. ~ Anonymous

Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It's an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen. ~ Jason E. Hodges

Mightier than the sword, the pen may be; but the tongue is mightiest of all. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Use your pen to set the world on fire.
Words ignite light, defeating darkness. ~ Deanna Marano Ramirez

I grow in worth, and wit, and sense, Unboding critic-pen, Or that eternal want of pence, Which vexes public men. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

When penciling in your future, always use a pen ~ Benny Bellamacina

When ink joins with a pen, then the blank paper
can say something. Rushes and reeds must be woven
to be useful as a mat. If they weren't interlaced, the wind would blow them away. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

I don't have a favorite cooking tool. In the kitchen, I always have my pencil and notebook in my hand. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical. The pencil has a symbolic meaning for me. The type of person who carries a pencil around is the type of person who's open to change. Someone who walks around with a pen isn't; he's the opposite. ~ Ferran Adria

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. ~ Millard Kaufman

Nobody ever looks behind the pen. ~ Khali Raymond

To be a writer one must bleed from the pen. ~ Sandra Saulnier

All four gospel writers were no doubt enthusiastic members of their local churches. They went there every Sunday; sometimes they preached themselves; sometimes they listened to the sermon and nodded when the tradition was repeated accurately. And eventually they were prevailed on to write down their own or their sources' recollections of the facts that had generated the tradition. This is why it is silly for X to say: "Mark wasn't written until the 50s at the earliest. That's a good twenty years after Jesus died. Mark couldn't be expected to remember things clearly after all that time." Mark didn't hibernate between the death of Jesus and the time he wrote his gospel, then take out his pen, scratch his head, and say: "It was a long time ago, and I'm trying to remember this for the first time, but so far as I remember it went something like this."31 ~ Charles Foster

That's the nice thing about being a live act. I can get the audience, but it's for the moment. It's like, 'Can I do it tonight?' And you can see when people like you. But on record - and with the pen - it's almost for all time. Really, a lot more thought has to go into it. ~ Phil Lynott

Would the pair of you like to turn your backs so you exclude us more effectively?" Jode asks.

"We're just adding to the list." I hold up my journal.

"Daryn." Gideon shakes his head, pretending to be disappointed. "It's our list."

"A list?" Jode leans back, resting his head against his bag. "What's this list about?"

Rather than explain it, I just lean over and give it to him.

Gideon puts his hand over his heart and winces. "I hate sharing, Martin."

I lean up, whispering in his ear. "Some things are only for you."

He gives me a long unblinking look that makes my face burn and my body feel light and hot.

"This is an outrage," Jode says dryly. "I'm in here once and Gideon is here … two, three, four times?"

"Three," I say. "The last one doesn't really count."

"Oh, it counts," Gideon says.

"How many times am I in it?" Marcus asks.

"Are you guys making this a competition?"

"Of course."

"Yeah."

"Definitely. And I'm dominating."

"For real," Marcus says. "How many times am I on there?"

"Once, like me. For your winning smile." Jode closes the notebook and tosses it to Marcus. "But don't let it go to your head. Gideon's arse has a spot on the list as well."

Gideon looks at me and winks. "Like I said, dominating."

"Dare, you got a pen?" Marcus asks.

This catches me by surp ~ Veronica Rossi

During freedom struggle, It were authors and artists who made the Nation stand with their pen, and now their pen can create an environment of renaissance when Independent India is on the path of Good Governance. ~ Narendra Modi

Come be the stampede of emotion standing on this dancing ocean, as I empty out this flood within, down to the last drop of this naked pen. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

Emma thought of Julian, sitting here, in this office. Year after year, from the time he was twelve and all scraped elbows and torn jeans. He would sit patiently with pen and ink, writing his letter to the Clave, petitioning them to let his sister Helen come home from Wrangel Island. ~ Cassandra Clare

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers. ~ Dani Shapiro

About the only good thing about being sex-starved and hornier than the blue wildebeest in mating season she'd once had to write an essay on, was the vast improvement on her pen-pal repertoire. Phone sex? Pah! Any schmuck could talk dirty and get off on it. The art of airmail sex, however, presented a much greater challenge and one she'd excelled at, if Mark's responses were anything to go by. It was a wonder the planes didn't catch fire. ~ Allie A. Burrow

But our wounds are part of who we are ... and there is nothing left to chance ... And pain's the pen that writes the songs ... That call us forth to dance ~ Michael Card

I don't know. How can you know? I…I'm a monster. When I'm hungry, I might do anything."
"Oh no, of course I couldn't possibly understand you." Violet's shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. "I know, you woke up one day and found out that you couldn't be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be. You just weren't her any more, and there was nothing you could do about it. So your family decided you were a monster and turned on you." Violet sighed, staring out into the darkness.

"Believe me, I do understand that. And let me tell you - from one monster to another - that just because somebody tells you you're a monster, it doesn't mean you are.

"just now you told me what you did because you want me to stop you from eating Pen. If you were a real monster, you wouldn't have done that, would you?"

Trista's eyes stung, and she wiped strands of cobweb away with her sleeve.

"Idiot," added Violet, for good measure. ~ Frances Hardinge

Kim Stanley Robinson wields a pen like a samurai sword ~ Me

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what's coming next except that you're burning the road to outrun it. ~ Jack Kerouac

Before, I thought we could write about life only when we had recovered from our wounds; when we were able to touch old sores with a pen and not revive the pain; when we could look back free from nostalgia, madness, and a sense of grievance.
But is this really possible? We are never completely cut off from our memory. Recollections provides the inspiration for writing, the stimulus for painting, and for some, the motivation even for death. ~ Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Writers possess magic. It's in their words.
They compose phrases as powerful as incantations, creating illusions in the minds of readers. These spells make eyes envision things that aren't real; they make hearts feel things that aren't actual. A writer's work is to pen enchantments meant to entrance and hypnotize the mind, causing neglect of all other duties and responsibilities in order for the reader to remain a puppet controlled by the writer's wand. And if some foul friend does manage to break the spell, he is despised for it. His heroics are too late in coming. The words―the fairy tales―have seeped beyond the body and into the soul, taking possession. Our poor reader is infected, compromised, never to be cured. The notion of magic found in simple words such as, 'Once upon a time...' has always fascinated me. It is no wonder I am compelled to write. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen. ~ Alison Bechdel

We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher's hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world. ~ David Warlick

Amanda herself couldn't understand why her writing was so different from her own personality. Her pen seemed to take on a life of its own when she sat before a sheaf of blank parchment paper. She wrote about characters unlike any people she had ever known... sometimes violent, brutal, always passionate; some who came to ruin and some who even triumphed in spite of their own lack of morality. Since she had no actual pattern on which to base these fictional characters, Amanda realized that their feelings, their passions, could only have come from inside herself. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet. This would undermine the Church. I mean would be a step toward that. Next, education - next, freedom - and then she would begin to crumble. It being my conviction that any Established Church is an established crime, an established slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it. Why, in my own former day - in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time - there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been born in a free country: a "free" country with the Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it - timbers propped against men's liberties and dishonored consciences to shore up an Established Anachronism with. ~ Mark Twain

Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that – all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them. Of course, this may mean you'll never be published but that's a risk we all take every single time we set hands to keyboard or pen to paper. For me, if I can sit back at the end of a project and say, 'yes, I stayed honest, I said what I wanted to say, and I made it sing to the best of my ability', then I'm happy enough. Of course, if anyone wants to buy the damned thing off me when I'm done, that's jam I won't refuse. ~ Celine Kiernan

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. ~ Nicole Krauss

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That's why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be. ~ Gore Vidal

4. Or else:
Rough draft of a letter

I think of you, often
sometimes I go back into a cafe, I ist near the door, I order a coffee
I arrange my packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a writing pad, my felt-pen on the fake marble table
I Spend a long time stirring my cup of coffee with the teasspoon
(yet I don't put any sugar in my coffee, I drink it allowing the sugar to melt in my mouth, like the people of North, like the Russians and Poles when they drink tea)
I pretend to be precoccupied, to be reflecting, as if I had a decision to make
At the top and to the right of the sheet of paaper, I inscribe the date, sometimes the place, sometimes the time, I pretend to be writing a letter

I write slowly, very slowly, as slowly as I can, I trace, I draw each letter, each accent, I check the punctuation marks

I stare attentively at a small notice, the price-list for ice-creams, at a piece of ironwork, a blind, the hexagonal yellow ashtray (in actual fact, it's an equilaterial triangle, in the cutoff corners of which semi-circular dents have been made where cigarettes can be rested)

(...)

Outside there's a bit of sunlight
the cafe is nearly empty
two renovatior's men are having a rum at the bar, the owner is dozing behind his till, the waitress is cleaning the coffee machine

I am thinking of you
you are walking in your street, it's wintertime, you've turned up your foxf ~ Georges Perec

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa ~ Bukusai Ashagawa

No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Through the years the swirl of a pen, click of a key, and the idea of a story have been my deepest passion. I never just decided to become a writer. I was born to be a writer. I knew it from childhood. ~ Sai Marie Johnson

Did I ever tell you that my mother and father started out as pen pals? They wrote these long, unabashedly affectionate love letters to one another, peppered with clichés and pie-in-the-sky proclamations of eternal devotion. Despite my father's eventual dishonesty and unfaithfulness, I have to believe he meant every word he wrote at that time, and it was admittedly romantic, uncovering my parents' yellowed letters, all soft, crumbling corners and black ink stains, one rainy afternoon. Because how can anyone scrawl lies, really, in their own handwriting, the evidence of your own betrayal right in front of you? I sat cross-legged on the floor, holding my breath as I unfolded each letter, fragile and expectant, like a little girl opening her presents on Christmas morning. I sat there and soaked up my parents' love for each other, and then I wondered where all those feelings had escaped to. I wondered where love went when it was lost - did it travel far, across miles and oceans and forests and deserts, or did it linger somewhere nearby, just waiting for a chance to be summoned again? Wherever it was, I could only hope it had ended up settling somewhere quieter, safer. ~ Marla Miniano

Mike, you ready? he said. The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher's paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment. In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth. ~ James Patterson

When pondering who I am, I write the fiction that I want directly over the facts that I hate. However, what I've discovered is that fiction is written in pencil while facts are in pen. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Crushed to earth and rising again is an author's gymnastic. Once he fails to struggle to his feet and grab his pen, he will contemplate a fact he should never permit himself to face: that in all probability books have been written, are being written, will be written, better than anything he has done, is doing, or will do. ~ Fannie Hurst

I feel very lucky that when I'm burnt out of acting I take to the pen and I write something I want to direct. ~ Lake Bell

Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience ... Moving ... compassionate. ~ Leigh Newman