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

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My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don't outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It's an organic process that's usually pretty flexible. — Lisa Lutz

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

It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn't wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she's a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else — things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things — but she doesn't wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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 as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer... — William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it. — Tracy Kidder Good Prose: The...

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

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

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if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing.

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

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

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

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