Writing quotes

[lovecraft68]

Post your favorites.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

 

[lovecraft68]

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Not a quote, precisely, but one of my favorite poems. Appropriate to our Here.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

- Dylan Thomas

 

[PuckIt]

 

[TarnishedPenny]

OK, two quotes from the much-mourned Ursula le Guin:

“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.”

and

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

May she rest in true peace.

 

[My I]

"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig." Lazarus Long (aka Robert Heinlein)

 

[PuckIt]

I feel your pain, Calvin. I really do.

*sigh* fine. While this one and the one I posted earlier really are real ones that I feel helped me get over a hump, there is one I remember from a long time ago.

"Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer."
– Ray Bradbury

 

[jehoram]

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
--Samuel Johnson

An inappropriate quote for this site, considering that nobody gets paid for these stories.

 

[Carnevil9]

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

“...writing is a legal way of avoiding work without actually stealing and one that doesn't take any talent or training.”

- R.A. Heinlein

 

[michie]

I can never read all the books I want;
I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.
I can never train myself in all the skills I want.
And why do I want?
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.
And I am horribly limited.

Sylvia Plath

 

[michie]

.........more Sylvia

I write only because
There is a voice within
That will not be still



(could probably quote her about creativity all day)

 

[My I]

Write what you like. There are no other rules. - O. Henry

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Not everyone likes me, but then not everyone matters - Unknown

"a nut for a jar of tuna" Backwards is ... (go ahead write it backwards )

 

[jehoram]

.........more Sylvia

I write only because
There is a voice within
That will not be still

That's something like what Victor Hugo wrote: "A writer is a person with a world trapped inside."

 

[lovecraft68]

 

[lovecraft68]

Its truly my calling

 

[Athalia]

I think it was Mark Twain who apologized for writing a long letter, explaining that he didn't have time to write a short one.

 

[PuckIt]

"YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD WHO CAN KILL YOUR DREAM. *NO ONE* can make you quit. *NO ONE* can take your dream away." - Jim Butcher, 03Nov2011

 

[ElectricBlue]

I think it was Mark Twain who apologized for writing a long letter, explaining that he didn't have time to write a short one.

Also Churchill, allegedly.

 

[JasonClearwater]

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s,” writes King. The important part isn’t writing enough, but limiting how much you say. Visualise what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. You need to describe things “in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition,”

- Stephen King

I've spent a year or so working on this. Working on which elements need to be described, so that the reader can fill in the rest, vs attempting to describe things as I want the reader to see them.

It's a work in progress.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I think it was Mark Twain who apologized for writing a long letter, explaining that he didn't have time to write a short one.

Also Churchill, allegedly.

OK (frustrated historian speaking...) this is fun! I had always heard it attributed to Churchill, but have done some digging.

Winstonchurchill.org (https://www.winstonchurchill.org/?s="a+shorter+letter") doesn’t mention it in their list of Churchillian quotes, so I went to Quote Investigator (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/) . To my surprise, although they produced a quote with the same general thesis from Mark Twain, it wasn’t anything near the same format or nearly as pithy:

You’ll have to excuse my lengthiness—the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost.​

Quote Investigators, on the other hand, attributes different but much closer versions to:

Blaise Pascall, 1657: I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. (translation from the French)

Ben Franklin, 1750: I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.

Henry David Thoreau, 1857: Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

​

And others. (All Quote Investigators attributions, BTW, are given with references.

So, bottom line, probably neither Twain nor Churchill. (Pity, as I admire both of them a lot.) It may well be one of those universal truths that great people come upon independently, like both Newton and Leibniz with calculus.

 

[lovecraft68]

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s,” writes King. The important part isn’t writing enough, but limiting how much you say. Visualise what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. You need to describe things “in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition,”

- Stephen King

I've spent a year or so working on this. Working on which elements need to be described, so that the reader can fill in the rest, vs attempting to describe things as I want the reader to see them.

It's a work in progress.

Not that I don't enjoy King, especially everything he wrote up until the early nineties, but anytime he says anything about killing your darlings or being brief I roll my eyes. The man is one windy bastard. IN Black House(co authored with Peter Straub and the sequel to their prior collaboration the Talisman) he starts describing a town....every single person of interest in the town, every one...without doing anything to break it up....by page 75 I said fuck this shit.

 

[SimonDoom]

Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

 

[ElectricBlue]

OK (frustrated historian speaking...) this is fun! I had always heard it attributed to Churchill, but have done some digging.

That's not digging, TarnishedPen, that's forensic literology (or literal archeology). I'm impressed (as one fan of the ages to another).

 

[JasonClearwater]

Not that I don't enjoy King, especially everything he wrote up until the early nineties, but anytime he says anything about killing your darlings or being brief I roll my eyes. The man is one windy bastard. IN Black House(co authored with Peter Straub and the sequel to their prior collaboration the Talisman) he starts describing a town....every single person of interest in the town, every one...without doing anything to break it up....by page 75 I said fuck this shit.

He seems to have gone through phases. And then at some point, he absolutely let others publish under his name, and their writing was amateur as fuck.

One thing I've noticed - as writers achieve more fame, their editors seem to stop cutting their work, and it shows. You need to let your editors hack your work, no matter how much people love your work. They know what they're doing. Longer isn't better, if half of it's pointless drivel that you wrote to explain something to yourself.

So, I'd agree with you. But I also agree with this quote. At this point, in my own evolution.