Writing And Travel Quotes

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. ~ Elena Ferrante

For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places. ~ Elaine Dundy

Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.
"Still?" people ask. "But you seem fine!" To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.
"So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?" people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.
"But it's really bad to be on medicine that way," they say. "Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!" If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.
"So maybe you'll stay on a really low maintenance dose?" They ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don't want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but ~ Andrew Solomon

My ideal life is just lounging around the house and every once in a while I'll kind of write something, and then I'll leave and eat something and masturbate or whatever - just this very fluid life of comforting myself. ~ Miranda July

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian. ~ Nellie Melba

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words. ~ Thurston Moore

You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person. ~ Isabel Allende

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management. ~ Edward Abbey

You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places. ~ Jen Campbell

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints. ~ Jim Harrison

A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me. None of this has diminished despite years of self-analysis, therapy and "writing as healing", as some of my students used to call the attempt to make at. Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to. If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I'd better enjoy them, then. ~ Hanif Kureishi

I am never much interested in the effects of what I write ... I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my ... books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion. ~ H.L. Mencken

Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isnt in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I dont, see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it, But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,, April ~ Daniel Keyes

When I wrote about media and technology, I had a lot of lonely, even intimate book talks. Since writing about dogs, I have a lot of company at book signings. ~ Jon Katz

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret. ~ Silas House

Along that straight and true path there are other goals: missionary service, temple marriage, Church activity, scripture study, prayer, temple work. There are countless worthy goals to reach as we travel through life. Needed is our commitment to reach them. ~ Thomas S. Monson

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts. ~ Billy Wilder

I don't think talking about myself making songs is a very interesting topic, there are so many other more engaging things to think about and write about. ~ Jeffrey Lewis

Writing a book is about me doing the work to get from the obsessive particular to something that reaches out of that in some meaningful way. It doesn't come easy to me. I really admire people who do it with acuity, but I don't, and for me it takes the process of working on a book for years to do any thinking that I feel accomplishes anything. I don't do it off the cuff well. ~ Lucy Corin

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there. ~ Piers Anthony

If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it. ~ John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon Of Tara

I am never happy when I finish a book. I always start feeling good, and then I get to about Page 75 and start losing momentum - and I kind of pull it together at the end, but by then I think it's just all over. It's become almost a running joke among my agent and my editor - I always say that, so they don't take me seriously anymore. ~ Sarah Dessen

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more. ~ Donald Hall

O write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it. ~ Samuel Johnson

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work. ~ Don DeLillo

I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on. ~ Anne Waldman

You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world. ~ Milton Friedman

Writing now makes me feel as if I had lost at least one of my senses. I can't hear you or see you and I wonder if you hear me. One thing is quite sure. I love you. Yours, George. ~ Robert M. Edsel

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes. ~ Sandra Cisneros

She gazed out across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork and reasoned like this: writing was only the words that people said, squeezed between layers of paper until they were fossilized (fossils were well known on the Discworld, great spiraled shells and badly constructed creatures that were left over from the time when the Creator hadn't really decided what He wanted to make and was, as it were, just idly messing around with the Pleistocene). And the words people said were just shadow of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing. ~ Terry Pratchett

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies - in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicate
a preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world - among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees. ~ Mary Oliver

...but for the Girl Writing A Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love. ~ William Carpenter

Music's always part of my writing. I think all art is interconnected. You can't create or experience one without its influences bleeding into another. In my writing, music's mostly something that feeds my inspiration and mood while I'm writing, but it's also taught me how to score scenes and even novels. The rise and fall of the storyline echoes the flow of a good piece of music. ~ Charles De Lint

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning. ~ Anne Tyler

You don't impress the officials at NASA with a paper airplane. You don't boast about your crayon sketches in the presence of Picasso. You don't claim equality with Einstein because you can write 'H20.' And you don't boast about your goodness in the presence of the Perfect. ~ Max Lucado

Rhythm, repetition, making patterns
these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn't lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decade. It is the humming that matters. ~ Breyten Breytenbach

The process of writing 'The Innovator's Dilemma' entailed the developing a new theory. My colleagues, students and I have been improving that theory, and adding others to it, since that time. ~ Clayton Christensen

Even if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize 'legacy' content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant ... Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of information in today's electronic society, which ... calls for an even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills
the very sort of 'legacy' content that teachers have focused on since classical times ~ Timothy VanSlyke

Obviously this all gets tricky/complicated when your writing reveals so much of your private/intimate life, and the nature of writing on the Internet comes with a lot of focus on your "personal brand." ~ Marie Calloway

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life. ~ Miguel Syjuco

You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place - you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter. ~ Bernard Malamud

The train rolled right through dinner and over the sunset and around ten o'clock and into a nap and out the next day... ~ Lindsay Mattick

There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves. ~ John M. Ford

I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping. ~ Jeanette Winterson