The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?" And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly:
I think all artists struggle to represent the geometry of life in their own way, just like writers deal with archetypes. There are only so many stories that you can tell, but an infinite number of storytellers.
Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit.
Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking , and celebrating a reunion. ( )
Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique…and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity—a bookish triumvirate.
Bill is a writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.
The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.
The greatest artists express their inner self; an artist paints her rage; a writer pens his fear; a dancer expresses her sadness through movement; and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance.
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.
A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: "The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.
I couldn't believe a man had written this! Ryker had a way with words and the way with words and the way my emotions got twisted in them was a gift only a true writer possessed.
Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called.
As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I’ll pen our love story, if you’ll be my co-author.
I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.
The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.
If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter...
A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like and and wait to spell from her pen.
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
