I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours
A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.
I’d say my writing voice is original, and I don’t think you’ll find another quite like it. This makes me sad, because when all my clones arrive sometime in the future, their only hope is to try to copy me.
Surrealist Tip # 7: Sleep through numbers 1-6. Write down your dreams while you sleep, sleep as fast as you can, but try not to get a ticket—and don’t let the honking of other drivers wake you up.
My writing doesn’t improve if you think it’s great, and it doesn’t lessen if you think it sucks. Likewise, you not showing me love doesn’t mean mine for you has to be invisible. The two are as unrelated as me and my foster parents.
If I’m going to write a book every American will want to read, it’s got to have lots of pictures. Those pictures must also move, and all the words in the book must be spoken and available audibly for all the readers to hear as they watch.
There's that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don't consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently.
Aeschylus writes, "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grade of God.
A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.
There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.
When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you
My father once admonished me to master the laws that govern fine writing until I could weave my words into worlds. If ever I accomplish that feat, I will sign my name to the tale.
Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. We can unlock our lives with a pencil tip.
Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.
If my name were Mark Twain, I’d write under the pseudonym “Samuel Clemens.
Victor, if you read this stuff, you can save people in the past from drowning. It's like time is a river, and it's nighttime, and you can hear people calling, Help, we're disappearing! So you stop and listen. That's how you save them.
All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
I'd prefer to die in Texas when I'm old. They say most good things end the same way they started, and that's where I entered the world, so that's how I'll leave it.
If you're trying to change someone you love, you don't love them. It's the oddnesses, the most unique imperfections that you'd miss the most. That's the stuff you can't replace. Everything else is easy to come by.
For years I was deathly afraid of my own weaknesses, but when I closed my eyes and let myself be vulnerable to them it allowed miracles to take place. Miracles that were only alive when I accessed my BLIND faith.
Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, mo...