Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magic...
You will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable t...
Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe: 1. Write a simple narrative. 2. Make a long list. 3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.
Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists togeth...
It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a ...
...this protracted war will pass through three stages. The first stage covers the period of the enemy's strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy's strategic consolidation and our preparation fo...
Do it again. Play it again. Sing it again. Read it again. Write it again. Sketch it again. Rehearse it again. Run it again. Try it again. Because is practice, and practice is improvement, and improvement only leads to perfection.
The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache of books. Writing a book is like loving someone. It can ...
The sword of the Spirit has been muffled up and decked out with flowers and ribbons," author writes, conveying the sentiments of a Congregationist minister on men's ceding of moral and religious instruction and correction as women's work.
Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it? Is there icing on it? he'd said. Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answe...
Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.
For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write
I think these movements and become them, here, In this room's stillness, none of them about, And relish them all-until I think of where Thrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writes Quick V's and Q's in the dust and rubs them out. from "Movements
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey...
Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it," he instructed before I began to write, "because you won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.
...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after ...
My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not. They will fight me at every turn and it is their domain. A writer cannot win against a s...
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. ...
No man has your love at heart, they all pretend to be what they are not. They would rather write you out of relevance and reckoning than recommend you for elevation and prosperity. Your destiny is in your hands and it will take you to scribble boldly...
We're not mindless golems, designed to think exactly the same thing. To try to suppress those thoughts is no better than slavery, and being free to say what you want, write what you want or draw what you want, as long as it doesn't offend anyone... T...
In one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and m...
