(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.
I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.
...I overheard Dorothy talking to Mr Montrose and she was telling Mr Montrose that she thought that I would be great in the movies if he would write me a part that only had three expressions, Joy, Sorrow, and Indigestion.
It is said that if you want to change the world, take pen and write. I want to add that if you want to maintain that change, then be the ruler to rule the pen's lines. True rulers are true leaders; they maintain a change!
I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.
Knocking on a door is so violent. Instead, try talking to the door to get it to open up to you. I should write a self-help book for door-to-door salesmen.
The Book of Life, I’m still writing it—both literally and literarily. So far I’ve written the Table of Contents. Right now it’s more of a coffee table.
The minute you think you have the right to belittle others because you think you’re better than them is the same minute you’ve proven you’re worse.
Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hat...
What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?
Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.
My name is Mr Bread." He began writing his name neatly on the board. "But you can call me Peter." Suddenly there was quiet, as thirty little brains whirred. "Pita Bread!" proclaimed a ginger-haired boy from the back.
I knew I could always earn money from a job. What I didn’t know was could I extend the dream of writing beyond my trip?
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
Perhaps defining a self begins with simply making the first choice, simply rising up and deciding what you desire, and then methodically, like writing, putting one word after the other until you have created a whole self and a whole life in the proce...
Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, "armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.
Birds are everywhere in our literature, a part, it seems, of our collective poetic imagination. If writing a beautiful line of poetry fills a poet's heart with joy, imagine how that same poet's soul must take flight at the sight of swallows soaring t...
I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.
You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.
