Writing Platform Quotes

(P)latform must be paired with good writing. ~ Chuck Sambuchino

Authority + Network=Platform. Authority to speak on a subject (self-help, spirituality, business, economics, etc.) is basically why you are the best person to write this book. And Network is whom you know who will buy the book. ~ Roseanne Wells

The easiest emotions for an author to evoke from readers are boredom and confusion. ~ Raul Ramos Y Sanchez

Writing a poem doubles, triples the experience or connection that initiated it. ~ Frances Mayes

There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.
There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story. ~ Christopher Priest

Your life should reflect your heart. ~ A.D. Posey

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books. ~ Eldridge Cleaver

I listened to a lot of The Stooges when I was writing "Oscillate," imagining our hero moving through his days naturally embodying the spirit of a real punk. I say real, because today's idea of 'punk as fashion accessory' doesn't even register with him, it's more about the way he engages with the world. ~ Travis Mathews

Tiant, noted for odd pitching mannerisms, is also a famous mound dawdler. Stands on hill like sunstruck archeologist at Knossos. Regards ruins. Studies sun. Studies landscape. Looks at artifact in hand. Wonders: Keep this potsherd or throw it away? Does Smithsonian want it? Hmm. Prepares to throw it away. Pauses. Sudd. discovers writing on object. Hmm. Possible Linear B inscript.? Sighs. Decides. Throws. Wipes face. Repeats whole thing. Innings & hours creep by. Spectators clap, yawn, droop, expire. ~ Roger Angell

School literally doesn't care about you unless you're good at writing stuff down or you're good at memorising or you can solve bloody maths equations. What about the other important things in life? ~ Alice Oseman

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. ~ Herman Melville

Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best. ~ Ira Glass

My '60s plays were as good as most of the other plays I've written ... except I wasn't in a condition to refine them, to help in the rehearsal, or do anything. I was hardly conscious of what was going on except during the hours of the day when I was actually writing ... and that was with the aid of speed. ~ Tennessee Williams

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

Author' is just a fancy word for Schizophrenic people with good writing skills and cash. ~ Testy McTesterson

Stand-up is like a movie every night. You write it, direct it, produce it, the audience votes, and you go home. There's nothing more satisfying. ~ Elayne Boosler

For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority. ~ Red Smith

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want. ~ Frederik Pohl

To be taken seriously about doing something creative and probably travel a lot. That was my motivation. I knew I was good, I knew I could write. I also knew you could get laid really easily. ~ David Bowie

I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings ... I would have done a novel about a man who hangs around with a gaggle of models. ~ Gideon Defoe

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

Unfortunately, these days, 'literary' writing seems to have become synonymous with 'showy' writing, writing that is beautiful but doesn't tell a story. This is a misguided trend. If today's 'literary' writers would look back only one or two hundred years at real literary writers like Dostoyevsky, Poe, Conrad, Melville, they would find momentous stories
not just pretty writing
at the core of almost all of their great works. ~ Noah Lukeman

Creativity is magic in the making. ~ A.D. Posey

If there's an article about sexual assault, if there's a video about feminism on YouTube, you're going to get the most horrible, disgusting comments ever. And sometimes the comments are pornographic, and sometimes the comments are really harassing. So I think that it's kind of a difficult place for women to write sometimes. ~ Jessica Valenti

The problem is that the inner critic is actually an indispensable element of any writer's working life; it is the immune system, the necessary resistance against the toxicity of bad writing. Excessive self-doubt is therefore like a sort of autoimmune disease, caused by an overactive and overpowerful inner critic: the cure becomes the condition. (Mark O'Connell NYTimes) ~ Patricia Costa Viglucci

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting. ~ Rodney Atkins

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. ~ Don DeLillo

If I'm feeling something, I know if it's a song, or if it's a little story that I'm going to write, or if it's a painting or play. I might sit down and write a play. ~ Michael Marisi Ornstein

Explore the world with an open mind, a sturdy carry-on, and clothes that don't wrinkle! ~ Madeleine K. Albright

People should love in the same way that they should write; insistently, fervently, forever. ~ R. YS Perez

It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in. ~ Asne Seierstad

New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual writing a screenplay-slash-graphic-novel on his iPad, natural selection is doing its job. ~ Bill Maher

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. ~ Donna Tartt

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself. ~ Paul Auster