12-04-2015, 09:27 AM | #61 |
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A couple more from the late E. L. Doctorow
"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." - E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow |
12-04-2015, 09:59 AM | #62 |
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He should have gotten a map.
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12-05-2015, 09:36 AM | #63 |
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Happy Birthday Joan Didion!
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.” ― Joan Didion, The White Album |
12-17-2015, 02:40 AM | #64 |
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"My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living"
Anais Nin |
12-28-2015, 02:46 AM | #65 |
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"Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."
I first saw this attributed to Ray Bradbury, however other (possibly more reliable, but who can tell?) sources say this was from Meg Chittenden. |
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12-28-2015, 06:43 AM | #66 |
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"I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working: spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell or he may be in the middle of one and we hope it is joyful."
- Andre Dubus from Broken Vessels |
12-29-2015, 09:59 AM | #67 |
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Dubus left us too early.
I have an almost complete collection of his First Edition Hardbacks [signed], in addition to almost all his ebooks. |
01-27-2016, 11:18 AM | #68 |
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"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."
– Anton Chekhov |
01-31-2016, 05:39 PM | #69 |
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"I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, 'Well them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.'"
- Flannery O'Connor - Writing Short Stories |
02-03-2016, 04:46 AM | #70 |
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I like this one by Moliere: Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. I think that you should always write for yourself, no matter what the trends are. I mean, I will never write a vampire love story although it's very popular right now.
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02-10-2016, 07:11 AM | #71 |
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(I was looking for a different quote and ran across these. )
"I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions." - T.C. Boyle "An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this." - Stephen King "Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments." - Dorothy Allison |
02-21-2016, 10:28 AM | #72 |
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Why I write:
"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." - Chuck Palahniuk |
05-19-2016, 10:34 AM | #73 |
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"[Self-published writers] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
--Dr. Ian Malcolm, on the ease of self-publishing eBooks without editorial assistance (From the film, 'Jurassic Park.' I may have paraphrased slightly, but I'm pretty sure it's what he meant.) |
06-19-2016, 07:43 AM | #74 |
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"The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act."
― Tobias Wolff Happy Birthday Tobias Wolff! Last edited by kennyc; 06-19-2016 at 07:45 AM. |
10-21-2016, 11:43 AM | #75 |
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In a letter printed in the 7/16 issue of Money Magazine, in response to an article on the most valuable career skills:
"Without a doubt, the skill that has always helped me get jobs and switch careers is writing. I always say 'Every company needs a writer!' I have been fortunate to work as a marketing writer, a proposal writer, and a technical writer, all in different fields: education, health care, finance, and insurance. It has been my saving grace." --Dawn Davis, NYC Last edited by ApK; 10-24-2016 at 06:46 PM. |
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