Tibetan Writing Quotes

Even if you're not selling your stories yet, your writing time is precious, often gained at the expense of other worthwhile activities. Don't waste it on a book you don't love. ~ Rachel Aaron

I'm tempted to say that the top three reasons for hopelessness are rejection, rejection, rejection. But let's cast our net wider. 1) Not being able to write as well as we hoped we could. 2) Not being able to write at all. 3) Rejection. ~ Ralph Keyes

Beware of advice - even this. ~ Carl Sandburg

Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.' ~ Susan Stewart

...grown up with very bad contemporary literature, and they find it much more fifficult to approach earlier writing than we do. The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain. ~ Margaret Atwood

Like with 'Parks and Recreation,' it's so much fun because the people writing it are funny and they're open and you just go in there and have a good time. It's pretty much the easiest job I've ever had. ~ Aziz Ansari

When you go home tonight, make a list of the people who are impediments, who don't believe in you, and call them up and tell them, 'Get the hell out of my life.' You don't need them. Writing is tough enough without having people around you who contribute to a writer's insecurity. ~ Ray Bradbury

Make time to write every day. The writing muscle is like any other muscle; the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. ~ Judy Penz Sheluk

Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. ~ Steven Pressfield

(Novelists, when their characters drive cars, never feel compelled to describe precisely what the physical actions are of hands, feet, eyes, knees, elbows. Yet many of these same novelists, when their characters copulate, get into such detailed physical description you'd think they were writing an exercise book. We all know the interrelation between the right ankle and the accelerator when driving a car, and we needn't be told. ~ Donald E. Westlake

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication. ~ Ian Anderson

Don't seek to emulate other writers. Don't pay heed to how others say your tales should be written. And don't ever change your writing on account of anything or anyone. Your stories are your own, so write them your way. ~ Morgan Wright

Writing in the electronic world, you imagine a sound, and then you have to go and find it. It's not like imagining a flute and then making that sound materialize. That's easy! ~ Christopher Young

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Finally, after a glance at Notre Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a cafe on the Place de l'Opera and watched the people. They were amazing
never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn't seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr. Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see the pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing. ~ Andy Garcia

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't. ~ Gloria Steinem

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all. ~ Madame De Stael

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? ~ Milan Kundera

The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. 'Europe', the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states were ordered.

Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H.W. Bush's proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world's future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warning uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book - Iran, North Korea - was founded by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March - April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer. ~ John Keegan

The most rewarding part of writing for TV is - a year ago I would have said it's just watching it on TV, it's just having been done with it and then collecting all that energy. ~ Dan Harmon

Your first draft is not a gold nugget. It might be a nugget, but it's not golden. ~ Ethan Nahté

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game ...
What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn't to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.
Finding the right balance of feedback - encouragement versus vigorous criticism - will help immeasurably.
But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.
If it's any consolation, I'm still working on this final lesson. ~ Steve Almond

Saying "yes" [to sexual activity] is a pretty low baseline for sexual experience and I wanted to write about what was happening to girls after "yes." ~ Peggy Orenstein

Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue. ~ Jack Woodford

I've got a few reasons why I've got to maintain stability. I've got into wanting people to hear my music. I've got something I want people to hear because I know they'll like it. They've gotta like it! The songs I've been writing are the sort of things you have to like. ~ Sly Stone

You never get over the fear of writing. ~ Maya Angelou

If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Willa Cather said that she write best when she stopped trying to write and began simply to remember. ~ Ralph Keyes

When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves. ~ Miles Davis

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing. ~ Anais Nin

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, and children ... Where nobody dies ... In my worlds people died. And I thought I was being honest. I thought I was being honest. ~ Neil Gaiman

I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly - for about six hours - considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write. ~ Ben Fountain

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing. ~ Willa Cather

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. ~ Ken Thompson

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. ~ Nadine Gordimer

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all. ~ Samuel R. Delany

In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body. ~ Annie Dillard

Writing about you is such a pleasure
Love for your is hard to measure
You might not believe me although
But your memories are my treasure.. ~ Anshu Pal

Then he went into the dining room, consulting his watch. It was ten thirty already. More than half the morning was gone. More than half the time for sitting and trying to write the prose that would make people sit up and gasp. It happened that way more often now than he would even admit to himself. Sleeping late, making up errands, doing anything to forestall the terrible moment when he must sit down before his typewriter and try to wrench some harvest from the growing desert of his mind. ("Mad House") ~ Richard Matheson

It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take at least nine films to tell - three trilogies - and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to make the middle story. ~ George Lucas

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be. ~ John Braine

What is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd? ... ~ John Geddes

Stories change the world. ~ A.D. Posey

There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me. ~ Dan Chaon