Writing Conflict Quotes

I was interested in writing something that has meaning in the larger context of global conflicts anywhere. ~ Ru Freeman

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict. ~ James Frey

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat ~ William Faulkner

Love hurts.

Think back over romance novels you've loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone.

So don't just make love, make anguish for your characters. As you structure a story, don't satisfy your hero's desires, thwart them. Make sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters doubts and despair. Make them earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them deserve it. Delay and disappointment charge situations and validate character growth. Misery accompanies love. It's no accident that many of the stories we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that this time we'll find a way out of the dark.

Only if you let your characters get lost will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its halls, and find our way into daylight. ~ Damon Suede

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. ~ Margaret Atwood

At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow. ~ Neil Gaiman

I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves. ~ Albert Goldbarth

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it. ~ Elizabeth Strout

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me. ~ Miriam Toews

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching. ~ Tony Gilroy

I don't use my writing career as a vehicle to get me acting work or to write roles for myself. ~ Danny Strong

I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds. ~ Warren Spector

And these aches in my heart create poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

I avoid writing until I can't avoid it anymore. Until writing comes knocking at my door like a friend I've neglected. ~ Aaron Starmer

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it. ~ Albert Brooks

There are major revolutions every few hundred years--humanity seems to depend on things being shaken up from time to time, to remind them of what is the most important. During those periods of conflict, in addition to the chaos which is inevitable, there is also a thread of great enlightenment. The light at the end of the tunnel, as it were. You don't ignore the dark side of truth, but you don't dwell on it to the detriment of forward movement. You have to also focus on what is best in humanity--those aspects of who we are which is luminescent, and perhaps even moreso in contrast to those dark moments. Showing both sides is what becomes incredibly important. ~ K.J. Wetherholt

Fiction, like sculpture or painting, begins with a rough
sketch. One gets down the characters and their behavior any
way one can, knowing the sentences will have to be revised,knowing the characters' actions may change. It makes no difference
how clumsy the sketch is - sketches are not supposed
to be polished and elegant. All that matters is that, going over
and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one's
story, one improves now this sentence, now that, noticing
what changes the new sentences urge, and in the process one
gets the characters and their behavior clearer in one's head,
gradually discovering deeper and deeper implications of the
characters' problems and hopes. ~ John Gardner

To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward. ~ Chris Campanioni

Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life. ~ Sahara Sanders

To develop your own voice, you have to keep writing a ton, and this is something where I think Twitter is helpful. I use it to write a ton of jokes. You have to write a ton of bad stuff before you know what you're good at. And that's what some people I think have trouble with, the thought of getting past the bad stuff. ~ Megan Amram

We like writing with each other; it's fun. ~ Shawn Wayans

Prepare well! Take two inks; you may never know when one pen will stop writing! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve. ~ Theodora Goss

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop. ~ Norman Mailer

I am writing because sometimes we are closer to the truth in our vulnerability than in our safe certainties, ~ Rachel Held Evans

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind. ~ John Hodgman

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question. ~ Adam Kirsch

Distance from the troubled past is the product of economic and social change more than reflection or the mere passage of time, which may have little effect. To the extent that the basic circumstances of life remain unchanged, time becomes irrelevant; in fact, it may even deepen the hold of former attitudes, turning them into ancient truths. But as the foundations of social reality alter and the circumstances of daily life take on a new character, society can more easily accept hard truths and discard old controversies. It gains an ability to leave its past in the past and move into a different future.

[...] The desire of a few individuals to "overcome the past," to rise above enmity and engage a different future after a destructive war, is laudable but rarely is achievable for an entire society. Substantial numbers of people will defend old positions or insist on the validity of their grievances, and the next generation may revive propaganda or condemn efforts to "forget." Eventually, however, the world moves on, and changed realities allow acceptance of bitter truths about a troubled past. As progressively greater numbers acknowledge the past, historical wounds close, even those of bloody civil war [192 - 93]. ~ Paul D. Escott

In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly. ~ Lady Gregory

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it. ~ Noel Coward

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it. ~ Richard Stallman

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being. ~ Denis Johnson

'The Black Magician Trilogy' was about a conflict between countries and was very limited and almost claustrophobic in its range of settings, while 'The Age of the Five' was about a conflict between continents. ~ Trudi Canavan

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons. ~ Rick Riordan