Satisfaction Of Writing Quotes

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people. ~ Katherine Mansfield

A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Even the small satisfaction of writing letters was denied us. It came to this: not only had the town ceased to be in touch with the rest of the world by normal means of communication, but also - according to a second notification - all correspondence was forbidden, to obviate the risk of letters' carrying infection outside the town. ~ Albert Camus

There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all. ~ Josephine Tey

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over. ~ Eric Brown

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. ~ Henri Nouwen

Just as the smell of the earth during a Summer rain... Oh, how lovely is to love and to be loved in return. ~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

You struggle because you're locating all of the magic in your life outside of yourself. When you are loved, then you are lovable. When you are left behind, you are unlovable. When you "arrive" at some point of success and fame as a writer, you will be worthy. Until then, you are worthless.

As long as you imagine that the outside world will one day deliver to you the external rewards you need to feel happy, you will always perceive your survival as exhausting and perceive your life as a long slog to nowhere. Instead, you have to savor the tiny struggles of the day: The cold glass of water after a long run. The hot bath after hours of digging through the dirt. The satisfaction of writing a good sentence, a good paragraph. You MUST feel these things, because these aren't small rewards on the path to some big reward; these tiny things are everything. Savoring these things requires tuning in to your feelings, and it requires loving yourself instead of shoving your nose into your own question marks hour after hour, day after day.

You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, ho ~ Heather Havrilesky

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. ~ Alice Walker

Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you're reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel. ~ Paul Theroux

I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. ~ Porochista Khakpour

VANNBRUGGHE. (Spitting upon the floor) But the bounds of the Mind are yet unknown: we form our Judgments too much on what has been done without knowing what might be done. Originals must soar into the region of Liberty.

DYER. And then fall down, since they have Wings made only of Wax. Why prostrate your Reason to meer Nature? We live off the Past: it is in our Words and our Syllables. It is reverberant in our Streets and Courts, so that we can scarce walk across the Stones without being reminded of those who walked there before us; the Ages before our own are like an Eclipse which blots out the Clocks and Watches of our present Artificers and, in that Darkness, the Generations jostle one another. It is the dark of Time from which we come and to which we will return.

VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What is this stuff about Time? (To Dyer) This is well said, but this Age of ours is quite new. The World was never more active or youthful than it is now, and all this Imitation of the past is but the Death's Head of Writing as it is of Architecture. ~ Peter Ackroyd

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.
I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is.
I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote. ~ Donald E. Westlake

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's the last day of the year
and I still lose myself in good books
and warm tea,
those quiet nights
and writing your name
on my windshield. ~ Courtney Peppernell

Writing 'Schottenfreude' has reinforced the fact that there are few, if any, emotions that have not been experienced, and analyzed, by some of the world's greatest writers. ~ Ben Schott

I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild - timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline - a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample - that fear may be intense. ~ Stephen King

Regardless of how much you enjoy your work, you must accept that everything won't come easily. No one has clear sailing on their voyage to success. You will always meet obstacles to overcome. The attainment of real success isn't based on the absence of problems, but the extraordinary ability to deal with problems. Indeed, you will find greatest satisfaction in overcoming the toughest of problems thrown your way. And only by overcoming great difficulties can you achieve greatness in this world. ~ Ernie J Zelinski

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work. ~ Sara Sheridan

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood. ~ Stewart Stafford

Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city's underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It's long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That's what we're after, isn't it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel's length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains? ~ Ander Monson

Write first. Worry about getting an agent or publisher later. Write it first. Prove you can do it and then others will listen. Tons of people talk about books they want to write. Far fewer are those who actually complete that vision. Don't be a talker. ~ Po Bronson

Work - especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class - no longer seems germane to our novelists' apprenticeships and, not coincidentally, is no longer easy to find in the fiction they produce. Whether one finds this scarcity something to worry about or simply a fact to be noted probably says a lot about one's class origins and prejudices. ~ Gerald Howard

The proper work of a writing is truly to talk, or to reveal the truth, to some while leading others to salutary opinions; the proper work of a writing is to arouse to thinking those who are by nature fit for it; the good writing achieves its end if the reader considers carefully the 'logographic necessity' of every part, however small or seemingly insignificant, of the writing. ~ Leo Strauss

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Building your "dream life" is filled with things that can feel like the opposite of a dream:
Mistakes
Delays
Starting over
Failure
The building part is actually more of a rebuilding that is a continual process. The building is not linear in nature but far more interesting. You might start a creative dream, take the "next step", and find yourself completely bored, dissatisfied, or just not inspired. ~ SARK

Writing adds up to the conscience of our times. ~ Martin Firrell

Oscar-winning triumph. The New York Times called it "a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gun-fighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code." It was that and more. The hero acts precisely as many Americans believe their country acts in the world. He is an enforcer of morality and a scourge of oppressors; he comes from far away but knows instinctively what must be done; he brings peace by slaying wrongdoers; he risks his life to help others; and for all this he wishes no reward other than the quiet satisfaction of having done what was right. Shane reinforced a cultural consensus ~ Stephen Kinzer

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out. ~ Jeff Tweedy

Literature has always been related to utopia, so when the utopia loses meaning, so does literature. What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do-- what on earth do I know?-- was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, for in that way I could undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't, something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is, outmoded and, furthermore, romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before... ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute. ~ Gita V. Reddy

I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. ~ Sara Sheridan

No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us ... No subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning the belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. ~ Michel Houellebecq

I really, really enjoy fitting words together - but I only enjoy it when it's easy, when it sort of rolls along by itself. I never erase anything [and] I hardly ever write anything down ... The song will be finished before I write it down ... I won't write a song unless it serves me in some way, unless I feel I have to write the song to make myself feel better. If you're not overflowing with something, there's nothing to give. ~ Fiona Apple

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not. ~ James Thurber

Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. "Bring back the sidewalk!" she urged in one of her articles, explaining: "Community is born from social routine - running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters."8 ~ Bella DePaulo

There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few. ~ Nick Harkaway

If we are as free as we like to believe, then it makes sense that we are free to choose who we want to be. And then we set out into the world to acquire the knowledge, the wisdom, and the experience we need in order to become the painters, the dancers, the actors, the writers we have always dreamed of being.
We need a reason for everything we do in life.
Artists are guided by passion, by the need to create. And our emotions and dreams are amplified by our art. Whether a conscious decision or not, in order to be an artist, one has to create art. ~ Cristian Mihai

When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill. ~ Tony Kushner

I before E except after C. Weird?
By rebelling against the rules the word itself denotes its very meaning: of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.
I think all writers are weird. ~ Day Parker

Holden Caulfield is the embodiment of what we mean by the phrase "young adult" – too young to be a grown-up, but too wise to the world to be completely innocent. He's caught in the in-between, and that in-between is what all young adult authors write about. ~ David Levithan

A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running. ~ Victoria Nelson

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist
ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage. ~ Jonathan Carroll