![]() Author has written 3 stories for General, and Essay. About Me: I am a member of the United Church of Christ, and very proud of it. I took a writing class while in college. My teacher from that class handed out pages of quotes about writing...and other things like painting, dancing, etc. I decided to post these quotes here so I could share them with everyone. Most of the pages had quotes from several different people: Contrary to what many people think, a career in writing is not without its drawbacks--chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write. I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in again. A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Writer's block is what you get if you're too full of yourself and trying to be Garcia Marquez...It's like imagining you're a tree and trying to sprout leaves. Once you come to your senses and accept who you are, there's no problem. I'm not Garcia Marquez. I'm a late-middle-aged midlist fair-to-middling writer with a comfortable midriff, and it gives me quite a bit of pleasure. Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration. Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. What am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true. I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody. What you have to do now is work. There's no right way to start. You don't have to be somebody else to write well. How can you go out on a limb if you don't know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your own neck. Poetry is not a way of depicting the world, but a way of conversing with it, trying to know it. Talent is long patience, and originality is an effort of will and of intense observation. If you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won't be sitting there. The hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. Writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading. We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Writing...is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant. Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. The key to the treasure is the treasure. You have to be available to both the cheapest and the deepest things that play on you. I never have anything balanced in my mind when I set out; if I did I'd resign this profession from boredom and operate a hatchery. Stop looking at your feet and dance. Aim, but not too hard Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. If you've never been corny, then you aren't even in the ball game. Fall seven times, get up eight. Ring the bells that still ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. The imagination is like a car battery: when you leave it inactive is when it runs down. Despair is the desire to be other than oneself. Anyone can be a fisherman in May. The best way to know life is to love many things. There is another world, and it is in this world. I may not be good lookin', but I'm some woman's angel child. It's easu being a writer. What's hard is staying a writer. There were also pages of sayings all by the same person. Sayings from Picasso: Art is a lie that allows us to uncover the truth. Everything that can be imagined is real. I always try to do what I don't know how to do; that's how I learn to do it. If you know exactly what you're going to do, what good is doing it? When I don't have any blue, I use red. Good taste is the enemy of creativity. It takes a long time to become young. I've spent my whole life learning to draw like a child. A painting lives only through the person who looks at it. Any act of creation is first an act of destruction. Trying to avoid accidents--it's impossible. Accidents reveal the human being. Some of my favorite (not writing related) quotes: Change the words, don't change the meaning; My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. Never Place a period where God has placed a comma |