Interesting quotes

[NaughteeDragon]

This year I got the company to buy me “The Writer’s Year” day-by-day calendar. I like this quote from yesterday.

"The writer's secret is not inspiration-for it is never clear where it comes from-it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying-to dig a well with a needle — seems to me to have been said with writers in mind." -Orhan Pamuk

I’m tagging @Fatdog25 because he’s recently returned to some stories that have been sitting in his WIP pile. I can’t wait for other people to see them.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I've posted this before, but Murakami on being a novelist:

Right now I'm aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that's all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed - and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Beware the Dog if you value your lawn.

 

[SmilingLez]

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money." - Virginia Woolf

 

[BeechLeaf]

Reading your story after it is published always gives you a fresh light on it, even if it's textually identical to what you submitted. When Jane Austen read the published Pride and Prejudice, she noted:

There are a few typical errors; and a "said he," or a "said she," would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but "I do not write for such dull elves" as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

"The more you reason the less you create." - Raymond Chandler

Put that on my wall.

 

[caleb35]

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

• Cyril Connolly, The New Statesman (February 25, 1933).

 

[Comshaw]

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."
Mark Twain





Comshaw

 

[TarnishedPenny]

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

Dr Samuel Johnson, as quoted in Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. LL.D.

 

[ronde]

A few I really like.

“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”—Tom Clancy

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” —Ray Bradbury

William Faulkner: “A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

 

[OralAllOver]

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

 

[yowser]

“I don’t wish to touch hearts, I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.”

Vladimir Nabokov

 

[onehitwanda]

i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling

- e.e. cummings

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Sorry to include an entire poem, but Dylan Thomas hit the nail right on the head.

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.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently. - Larry Niven

If you've nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it, then let it not be your fault. - Larry Niven

 

[StillStunned]

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

No, it's not a love poem. It's "Ars longa, vita brevis": art outlasts life. It's about immortalising someone in art, so that they live beyond their own life.

For everyone who has inspired a story that one of us has written:

"So long as Lit survives and readers jerk,
So long lives this, and you live in this work."

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.

Jerry Pournelle

 

[Areala-chan]

"What can be explained is not poetry. It is when the powers of explanation desert him that the poet writes verse." -- John Butler Yeats

 

[Tio_Narratore]

The Mark Twain classic:

"Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

 

[Comshaw]

"Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery."

"The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience."
Joe Haldeman





Comshaw

 

[Kelliezgirl]

"Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery."

"The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience."
Joe Haldeman





Comshaw

“Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them." - Ursula K Leguin

 

[ronde]

"Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery."

"The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience."
Joe Haldeman





Comshaw

I guarantee that if you stray very far from "what you know" in anything except for Sci-Fi and Fantasy, a reader who does know will call out your mistakes.

I always temper that advice by adding, "or what you've researched well enough that your writing sounds like you do know".

Along that line is a favorite quote of mine.

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”

—May Sarton

 

[Comshaw]

I guarantee that if you stray very far from "what you know" in anything except for Sci-Fi and Fantasy, a reader who does know will call out your mistakes.

I always temper that advice by adding, "or what you've researched well enough that your writing sounds like you do know".

I agree. And it doesn't seem to matter how small a mistake is made. Picking the flyshit out of the pepper seems to be the chosen pastime of a few.


Comshaw

 

[old_prof]

I guarantee that if you stray very far from "what you know" in anything except for Sci-Fi and Fantasy, a reader who does know will call out your mistakes.

I always temper that advice by adding, "or what you've researched well enough that your writing sounds like you do know".

Along that line is a favorite quote of mine.

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”

—May Sarton

I certainly didn't understand people well enough at 15 to write decent characters. Of course, more than a half century later, not sure I can write decent characters still... (Or indecent ones either)

 

[yowser]

The thing that I believe about literature more than any other art form, is that it works by putting you into someone else’s shoes. It only works–that’s how it works–by putting you into the mind and the experience of another. When you pick up a novel, and start reading–whether it’s the character living in a time, living in a place, living in a set of circumstances that are completely alien from those that you live in, or whether the author his or herself is writing from a completely different experience–as soon as you immerse yourself in the narrative, as a reader, you are living another life, another person’s life. And there is only one way to do that that we’ve ever invented, in the whole history of the human race, and that’s through literature.

Michael Chabon