Jimmie Kepler > Jimmie's Quotes

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.”
― Erica Jong

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
― Dylan Thomas

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.”
― Johannes Kepler, Harmonies of the World

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.”
― Garrison Keillor

“If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.”
― Amy Tan

“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.”
― James J. Kilpatrick

“Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.”
― Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write or Add

“My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.”
― Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.”
― Rosemary Clement-Moore

“There is something about just setting the pen to paper that lifts me and helps to focus my energy and thoughts.”
― Susan Elaine Jenkins

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.”
― Bob Dylan

“Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.”
― Joni Mitchell

“Strangers are just friends waiting to happen”
― Rod mckuen

“Writing is the voice that calls us from dreams, that peeks out of the corner of our eyes when we think no one is looking, the longing that breaks out hearts even when we think we should be happiest, and to which we cannot give a name.”
― Judy Collins

“A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.”
― Bruce Catton

“I just write whenever I can.”
― Elmer Kelton