Quotes about writing-philosophy

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision a complex of emotions raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

Non-fiction can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.

One day, I decided I was going to write books forever.

I’m proud to be a writer. I’m doing the job all my heroes did.

Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.

Every day we live, we are writing our own secret book.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Sel

If something unusual is what you really see and really feel, and if that’s what does happen to you in your real life, how is THAT called FICTION? One simple reason... that it’s the only way the society would agree to call it “normal,” based on the current level of development of their mentality.

Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.

Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist’s life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes

dear me i think i can run miles after miles through my mind by imaginary flyover ,gather all together to write down on my notebook.

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.

One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.

Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.

If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.

It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Writing starts with living.

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Writer is a Film Director of letters.

Confusion of a Writer - Sometimes I want all limelight to shine on me and sometimes I just want to vanish underneath the deep waters.

Success does not bring happiness. Success brings success.

Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people’s stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe.

Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The ‘meant’ is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that’s the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don’t. It’s stories all the way down. And all the way up.

To master magical realism, one must make the real seem unreal but, more importantly, make the unreal seem real.

Keep working. Keep trying. Keep believing. You still might not make it, but at least you gave it your best shot. If you don’t have calluses on your soul, this isn’t for you. Take up knitting instead.

we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.

The muse is fickle; ergo, when she knocks, ANSWER! It may take a while, but trust me, she WILL knock. In the meantime, keep your ear pressed firmly to the door.

Authors are sick people.

Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.

As a writer: Aim toward becoming keen through a looking glass limn perspective on evoking pleasure of the senses with STRONG VERBS.

I use only my penned imagination to hold my readers captive.

I left my novels for better times, when I could dedicate the energy and enjoy the inspiration I feel while planning them; like the most delicious cherries on a cake one left for later so they can be savored to the utmost.

When I had my girls, I knew what magic felt like for the first time. I had created people who didn't exist before. Now I write for the same reason. Creating people and their life's stories through my writing is as close to magic as I'll ever get again.

If your writing fails to move the emotional needle, you are not reaching your readers.

Bringing you closer to the fragile edge of living is the job of a writer.

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.

In the minds of some people, writing is one thing, but thinking is quite another. If they define writing as spelling, the production of sentences with random meanings, and punctuation, then they might have a case. But who would accept such a definition? Writing is the production of meaning. Writing is thinking.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

I am the philosophy before any philosopher.

A chef’s magic is his ingredients, how he can substitute one for another, then break with convention by changing it all around again without once referring to the recipe. And then just at the death complete the beauty by adding another element never previously thought of. Well words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation. Sometimes both the chef and the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Writing a novel is a bit like being Daniel Boone. An author stands atop a ridge in a mountain range and can generally see a number of peaks in the distance. What lies between those peaks—the dales and glens, rivers, forests, and other features that distinguish one mountain landscape from another... is where the artistry and intrigue of the writing process lives. As the writer sets out into the story, leaving behind those high points—the beginning, a twist here and there, the climax, and, if perh

When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.

Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

Writing's in the nouns.

Poetic license is not a license to scribe recklessly.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy

If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.

Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.

There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.

Writing is taking human experience and wrapping it up into a package of your own ideas and hoping someone will pull the bow smiling on top to see what's hiding inside.

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

Write to evolve and you'll evolve to write.

What do you do when your head - your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?You focus on the really good ones!

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

Fiction gives us a reach into the lives of individuals that would otherwise be but a closed door. If we are gifted with a desire to tell tales, then we should tell them . . . if only to reach but a few.

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It’s the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure

Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk

There is nothing to writing. You nourish your creativity for months and years until you release your baby out into the world.

When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Imagination, curiosity, passion, creativity these are the words that move me!

Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person’s level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Only my characters truly know what's happening - I just hold the pen

I can't do anything else until the words in my head are set free.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.

(In reply to the question, 'Would you like some suggestions for a plot for your next book?')There are three problems with getting plot suggestions from other people. The first is that ideas are the easy part of writing; finding the time and energy to get them down on paper is the hard part. I have plenty of ideas already. Which brings me to the second problem: the ideas that excite you, the ones you think would make a terrific book, are not necessarily the same ideas that excite me. And if a wri

How do poems grow? They begin deep down in the pit of the soul as a seedling of a thought …

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person’s conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.

Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person’s cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.

I want to question societal norms, encourage people to think in new ways.

You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.

Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way... There's another level... A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I'm sitting in a chair. There's real comm

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

I enjoy writing historical fiction because it allows me to live more lives than just this one.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

A story is a part of the writer's soul, told to the world.

When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.

If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.