Writing Unpublished Quotes

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. ~ Sylvia Plath

Apparently "London" gave out my address! that's what they're saying ... not just London, though! Brazzaville, too! ... and said that I'm a dirty pornographer ... a letch besides being the most despicable traitor of the century! ... I'd make a urinal blush! that what we need is to cleanse France and the French language of this smut-writing, demoralizing, grammaclast who's sullying our sacred homeland and its literary heritage! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

If I'm writing ... even a piece of a song ... I write it down. If it still resonates six months down the line, a year, even five, those are the ones you put in your bag and you take to the studio. You come to realize, the ones that don't make it, they were only meant to live for that moment in your notebook or on the 4-track-and plenty of songs never get any farther than the 4-track. ~ M. Ward

Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught. ~ Erno Paasilinna

Verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is hte product of hours spent repeating scales." p. 26 ~ Stanley Fish

Honesty is easier when you have no face and no real name. And honesty, for me, is very easy on paper. ~ Katherine Reay

In an article offering a law enforcement perspective on allegations of ritual abuse, Lanning (1992, A law-enforcement perspective on allegations of ritual abuse) fails to give a precise definition of the term. Although he is quoted as having conducted a seven-year study FBI study that gives evidence that ritual abuse does not exist, when Noblitt and Perskin (2000, Cult and ritual abuse) requested a copy of his study from the FBI, "the bureau responded in writing that no such study existed." (p. 179). ~ David A. Sakheim, Susan E. Devine

By writing, you learn to write. ~ Samuel Johnson

Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I'm supposed to be doing. ~ Fran Lebowitz

All the books I liked were basically about the same topic. White Niggers by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Beatles and Lead by Lars Saabye Christensen, Jack by Alf Lundell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., Novel with Cocaine by M. Agayev, Colossus by Finn Alnaes, Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, The History of Bestiality trilogy by Jens Bjørneboe, Gentlemen by Klas Östergren, Icarus by Axel Jensen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Humlehjertene by Ola Bauer and Post Office by Charles Bukowski.

Books about young men who struggled to fit into society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, in short, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They travelled, they got drunk, they read and they dreamed about their life's Great Passion or writing the Great Novel.

Everything they wanted I wanted too. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

You're writing your life as you go - the question becomes, how do you want to write your life? ~ Hill Harper

Life is more than one genre'. ~ Juliette Power

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? ~ Alan Jay Lerner

Its weird how i dream things that are worth writing.Its like God is writing them into my mind while i am sleeping and the moment i woke up i know i have to write what i dreamt ~ Tebogo Phakedi

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

In my experience, cutting back is the crucial act that allows the vitality, precision and emotional heart of a piece of writing to emerge. ~ Pamela Erens

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

Today, when we live in a what is called Western democracy here ... you're not taken seriously all the time. You can write what you want because nobody cares about it. But at that time, they cared very much about what you wrote, so that's an entirely different feeling. ~ Stefan Heym

Ability is nothing without opportunity ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty. ~ Stephen King

Commercial cellphone use began in the early 1980s, but it took 20 years to go from the first to the billionth cellphone subscriber in 2002. It then took only four years to reach two billion subscribers in 2006, the approximate beginning of the Shift Age. It then took two years to reach three billion cellphone users in 2008, four billion by 2009, five billion by the end of 2010, and 5.3 billion by the end of 2011. As of the writing of this book, there are 7.2 billion people alive today, and approximately 6.1 billion of them have cellphones. If you discount those under the age of eight and those living in remote parts of the world, humanity has now reached almost complete cellphone ubiquity. ~ David Houle

Everyone can open a book not everyone can appreciate the beauty of the writing. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Actually I was writing with people that didn't get records. ~ Cynthia Weil

You sit down in the morning on your own to write something. You get to the end of the day and it's not like you've cracked it and it's finished and it's done, because it can always be improved. It can always be changed. There is no right answer, so you can drive yourself crazy with just the expanse of infinite possibilities when it comes to writing. ~ Dan Mazer

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit. ~ Alberto Manguel

I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair. ~ Charles Bukowski

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. ~ Mark Twain

Brandon: How does the character fit into the story, how will people expect them to fit into the story, and how, therefore, can I make them incongruous for those expectations? I'm looking for incongruity. Ask yourself why this character cannot fill the role in the plot that they are expected to fulfill. Ask yourself who would be perfect for this role. I'm not going to use that person. ~ Brandon Sanderson

The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. ~ Dani Shapiro

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots. ~ Umberto Eco

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way. ~ Dana Spiotta

There is no rule on how to write. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it. ~ William Zinsser

Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. ~ Anne Lamott

My writing life is always a bit disorganized. It's hard for me to get going, but sometimes, once I begin, I go like the wind. ~ Sue Miller

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes ... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance. ~ T.C. Boyle

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

When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience. ~ Robert McKee

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on. ~ Richard Hell

I always knew when I graduated from high school, I'd go to college. I never thought about what I was walking away from ... I just wanted to study literature and writing. ~ Gaby Hoffmann

… I was constantly trying to shoehorn characters into each other's lives, planting them on street corners or in cafés together so that they could talk. So that they could explain things to each other, from across the great human divide. But it was all so contrived. Contrived and meddlesome, really, because sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist. If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. If they don't, well, that's interesting, too. Or, if it isn't interesting, then maybe you need to back up and start again. ~ Lisa Halliday

When I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. But I would always say, "Well, it's not that I don't want to write for these big magazines, but you can't edit it." ~ Fran Lebowitz

In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply "dropped the ball." We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing's true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it's necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor's nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth. ~ Max Brooks