Quotes about Writing and the Creative Process

[celebkiriedhel]

I have a million of them. And they provide comfort and encouragement at times... (and sometimes a kick up the butt)

So I thought I'd put them down here, that way we can all get encouragement, and maybe if you have some you can add to my hoard! ;D

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When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralysed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless ocurrence of one damned thing after another.
-- John Gardner

The surest way to bore some one is to tell them everything.
-- Voltaire

You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul.
-- G. B. Shaw

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark places it leads.
-- Erica Jong

I don't think that talent or gift, if such things exist, has anything to do with what the final receipts will be. My notion is that anyone who speaks, by reason of that speech, has prospects of achieving important, imaginative writing. I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead old-fashioned notions of perseverance, application and industry. It comes down in every instance to this dualism between what one wants and what one may be afraid to have.
-- Gordon Lish

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of creation there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from teh decision, raising in one's favour all manner of events and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way. Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power.
-- Goethe

The only failure in writing is stopping
-- Natalie Goldberg

Write about something that will change your life. It is the best gift you can give yourself.
-- John Truby

Literature becomes a humble exercise of faith in being all that one can be in one's faith in the mystery of poetry which gradulally expands into a faith in the mysterious service of truth.
-- Stephen Spender

Without unceasing practice nothing can be done. Practice i s art. If you leave off you are lost.
-- William Blake

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song still in their heart.
-- Henry David Thoreau

There's no higher art than living a good life. An artist informs the world of what is behind the masks we all wear. That's what we are all here to do.
-- Marianne Williamson

All the fun's in how you say a thing.
-- Robert Frost

I haven't consciously tried to develop it (style). The only thing I've consciously tried to do is put myself in a position to hear the people I want to hear talk talk.
-- Nelson Algrin

[celebkiriedhel]

Dialogue is a very powerful weapon, isn't it.
-- Kingsley Amis

Writing like life is a voyage of discovery.
-- Henry Miller

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk however, and only there, lies the freedom of art. Like all freedom, it is a perpetual risk, an exhausting adventure, and this is why people avoid the risk today, as they avoid liberty with its exacting demands, in order to accept any kind of bondage and achieve at least comfort of soul. But if art is not an adventure, what is it and where is it's justification?
-- Albert Camus

The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
-- Bob Proctor

It is important to remember that all writers are notoriously inconsistent in their attitudes toward their work. The value they accord any work will shift and change in any given moment, like the weather. A final judgement is virtually impossible to reach and for many reasons this is a good thing.
-- Victoria Nelson

I've told every young writer I know to do the job all the way through even if they think it is no good. All writers are discontented with their work as it's being made. That's because they are always aware of the potential and believe they're not reacuing it. But the reader is not aware of the potential so it makes no difference to him.
-- William Saryoyan

What I have done all through my writing is to repeat: "this is the best I can do: take it or leave it..." Or again: "if it isn't literature, call it what you like. I don't give a damn."
-- Henry Miller

Now it is a strang thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome make a good tale...
-- J.R.R. Tolkein (from the Hobbit)

Even if we look like functioning artists to the world, we feel we never do enough and what we do isn't right. We are victims of our own internalised perfectionist, a nasty internal and external critic. The Censor, who resides in our brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as truth. Make this rule: always remember that your censor's negative opinions are not the truth. This takes practice.
-- Julia Cameron

If the writer understands that stories are irst and foremost stories, and that the best stories set off a vivid and continuous dream, he can hardly help becoming interested in technique, since it is mainly bad technique that breaks the continuousness and checks the growth of the fictional dream.
-- John Gardner

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he puts his heart into his work and has done his best. Trust thyself. Evcery heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place divine providence has found for you. Before a leaf bud bursts, it's whole life acts; in the full blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Man cannot be happy until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Get through the first draft as quickly as possible. Like the King of Hearts advises Alice: 'Begin at the beginning, go through to the end and then stop.'
-- Lewis Carroll

It's not a matter of being taught what you don't know. It's a matter of learning to use what you already know.
-- Dr. Johnson

Conception and execution are the same thing. Art is the activity of painting or writing. "Without unceasing practice nothing can be done. Practice is art. If you leave off you are lost."
-- William Blake

The bold imagination produces great art.
-- Northrope Frye

[celebkiriedhel]

Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please."

Charles Baudelaire.

[celebkiriedhel]

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
-- Anais Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection”
-- Anais Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
-- Anais Nin

[laura]

These are great! Keep them coming!

I'll try to dig up a couple of my own to add to this too.

[celebkiriedhel]

"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers

Please will you do the job for me."
— C.S. Lewis

"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
— Franz Kafka

"Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton."
— Don Roff

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
— Haruki Murakami (Hear the Wind Sing)

"Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading."
— Eudora Welty

"A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to."
— Tom Bissell

"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."
— Mary Shelley

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
— James Nicoll

"The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent... "
— Charlotte Brontë

"It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence."
— Isadora Duncan

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
— Cyril Connolly

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
— Carlos Fuentes

"You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...

It will come if it is there and if you will let it come."
— Gertrude Stein

[Velvet]

Oh I do like these! Yummy, yummy woooords!