Writing process - Dual-Language Quotes That Speak to the Heart

Home Page » Categories » Writing process

Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline. — Hallie Ephron

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed. — Shirley Jackson Let Me Tell You:...

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living. — Chloe Thurlow Katie in Love

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost. — Ann Patchett The Getaway Car:...

Where do {writers} get {their} ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where the come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven, and we reach...

Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.

Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as...

Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

At it's best,the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then - and only...

I've found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours...

The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov...

In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose story plot continuity... Insofar...

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Today Birthdays

1953 - Anna Quindlen 1952 - Marianne Williamson 1952 - A. Whitney Brown 1621 - Jean de La Fontaine 1970 - Beck 1839 - John D. Rockefeller 1943 - Faye Wattleton 1955 - Monty Don 1908 - Nelson Rockefeller 1973 - Sebastian Maniscalco 1977 - Milo Ventimiglia 1951 - Anjelica Huston 1926 - John Dingell 1981 - Lance Gross 1906 - Philip Johnson 1949 - Wolfgang Puck 1965 - Lee Tergesen 1959 - Robert Knepper 1998 - Jaden Smith

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...

It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....

Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...

Categories »

Today Birthdays

Popular quotes

Categories