Writing Homilies Quotes

No matter how much planning you do the story will always tell itself the way it wants to be told. ~ Stoo Goff

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult. ~ John Fowles

Publishing in magazine is an under-used route for authors to reach readers. As a former magazine editor, I understand the power of reaching the audience…With one article, I have reached millions of people. ~ W. Terry Whalin

What do you want to write? What gets your goat? What irks you to no length? If you could change the world with words, what would they be? ~ Lori Lesko

Weak words can never carry the weight of strong feelings. ~ Terveen Gill

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. ~ Sylvia Plath

It is from the graves and ruins and rubbish-heaps of Egypt that writings have been restored to us in great numbers. ~ Frederic G. Kenyon

The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this crisis. They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And then they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis. It's perfect circularity. ~ Elizabeth Warren

Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn't mean you know how to write. ~ Greg Rucka

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series. ~ James Gunn

Being a maverick traveller, one would like to place oneself in the place of a local; just listen without judgement. ~ Mary Jane Walker

Twitter actually may be improving its users' writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters - it ~ Christian Rudder

I don't want my writing to be recognized. ~ Shawn Ryan

I'd never imagined myself writing at all until I was almost 30. And horror films weren't to my taste, at least the super popular (slasher-y) ones of the day back then. The first novel I ever loved as a kid was Frankenstein, and I was always a crazy Hitchcock and Polanski fan ... but I never saw myself - a square spazzy girl from the suburbs - writing anything that would horrify anyone. Or so I thought ... ~ Karen Walton

I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don't know why he chose to write it, but I'm glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can't become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American. ~ Ronald Reagan

We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do. ~ Arthur Kleinman

But listen: The weight of the camera reminds me to see. It helps me decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or newly announced. I look for water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond in winter with delirious force. If I can't see, then I don't know, and if I don't know, I'm not writing, and while some may question the value of words, or of memoir in particular, I will again make this claim: Words rendered true spook and spur us. They expect of us. They expect for us. Photographs do the same thing: "Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees," said Paul Strand. ~ Beth Kephart

Sometimes when I am writing, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words. ~ Stephen Spender

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck. ~ Kim Addonizio

I sometimes think about writing just to keep my mind active when I'm not working, but I don't think I would be good enough. ~ Ruby Bentall

Well, of course it was a very trying time for me, and fortunately I had a lot of people who were supportive. A lot of people who were writing and calling and saying they were praying for me. Some people sent me Scripture, and that helped. ~ Anita Hill

The most reward experience is having another writer come up to you and say that they started writing because they read my books. That is how writing as a profession continues: readers becomes writers who inspire new readers. ~ Michael Scott

If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other. ~ Richard Siken

If you are afraid to write it,
that's a good sign.
I suppose you know when you're
writing the
truth when you're terrified. ~ Yrsa Daley-Ward

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him. ~ Robert Crais

You couldn't even write me a paper about the roles you would dream of playing in modern musical theatre. ~ Elaine Paige

But what is it, to be an artist? Nothing shows up the general human dislike of thinking, and man's innate craving to be comfortable, better than his attitude to this question. When these worthy people are affected by a work of art, they humbly say that that sort of thing is a 'gift.' And because in their innocence they assume that beautiful and uplifting results must have beautiful and uplifting causes, they never dream that the 'gift' in question is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.
[...]
Listen to this. I know a banker, grey-haired business man, who has a gift for
writing stories. He employs this gift in his idle hours, and some of his stories are of the
first rank. But despiteI say despite-this excellent gift his withers are by no means
unwrung: on the contrary, he has had to serve a prison sentence, on anything but trifling
grounds. Yes, it was actually first in prison that he became conscious of his gift, and his
experiences as a convict are the main theme in all his works. One might be rash enough
to conclude that a man has to be at home in some kind of jail in order to become a poet. ~ Thomas Mann

There's a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional. ~ Diana Gabaldon

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing. ~ John Banville

The pie-cook and the pie-consumer are both lucky if the smell of the pie 'sells' not only its desirability as biological fuel but also remembrance of pies past. ~ Janet Clarkson

IN MY SO-CALLED CAREER, I'VE OFTEN WRITTEN THINGS THAT I VAINLY THOUGHT WERE INCREDIBLY GOOD AND THAT I ENJOYED READING SO MUCH I FIGURED EVERYBODY ELSE WOULD ENJOY THEM TOO, AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, I HAVE BEEN TOTALLY WRONG … I never stopped being surprised that so many critics were uninterested in them, or dismissive, or even hostile. often they tried to point out the allegorical failures of the pieces, even when they were clearly as non-allegorical as they could get. and more than a couple of times, I received emails from somebody asking me what happened, why didn't I write the stories I used to write, and why did I get into all this 'animal rights' nonsense? I guess they thought I was picketing outside university research facilities. I consider all my stories and novels to be animal stories … I never understood why people took MFA degrees, or creative writing courses, and I avoided taking them myself for many years … honestly, I can't imagine why anybody would want to go through the pain and agony of having his work critiqued in an open forum - I tell my creative writing students this all the time, they are all far braver than I am! ~ Scott Bradfield

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction. ~ Laurence Yep

The more I get into it the more isolated I feel vis-à-vis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind... I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir...It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case... You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside... With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity... (citing Jane Bowles, 1947) ~ Chris Kraus

I'm getting older, so how people face grave circumstances is of interest to me. And you meet a lot of people who are very courageous, and it doesn't reek of something funny to write about, but I always think that the higher the stakes, the bigger the laughs can be, and the more emotional the scenes can be. ~ Judd Apatow

Whenever people ask me, "How are your books doing?" or, "How is your book doing?" I just say, "It's okay." I mean, what am I supposed to say? I'm a writer; that means I write because I need to write, because that's how I breathe and that's how I bleed. I'm not an author; I'm a writer. Even when I don't want to write; I can't stop! So, how are my books doing? The hell I know! The moment after I publish one book, I'm writing another one! I don't know how my books are doing! I just know that I'm writing them! I'm a writer, I'm a writer. I'm not an author. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Each sentence should have proper meaning, details should not be needlessly repeated, and every sentence should add to the entertainment value in one way or another. ~ A.J. Flowers

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong. ~ Tom Stoppard

I'm always writing. And, I mean, I always counsel people when they call me a musician: I really do not have the skills of a musician. I really don't think like a musician, though I love music and I perform and sing. ~ Patti Smith

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper. ~ Peter Greenaway

God flourished my ministry and my career of creative thinking, communicating and writing back 50 years. ~ Robert H. Schuller

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember. ~ Regina Spektor

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. ~ Joanna Scott

Writing is not a literary act but spiritual. And pastoring is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

If I can be writing, I can take a certain amount of control when so much around me is upsetting. ~ Carolyn Chute

You can't write poetry on the computer. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Fans are really important for me. And if they take pains to write me, it's the minimum that I answer myself. ~ Daniel Radcliffe