Posts tagged quotes by writers
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Armistead Maupin’s Wisdom for Writers from the book Why We Write
(via the-masked-writer)
I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale ‘til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
