Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”
― Tennessee Williams

“nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I want to see thirst
In the syllables,
Tough fire
In the sound;
Feel through the dark
For the scream.”
― Pablo Neruda

“It’s not: I jumped in, and it was cold. No. It was cold, and I jumped in. Always arrange a sentence so you appear to be fearless, when in fact you are far less than fearless—you are clueless.”
― Jarod Kintz, At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.

“Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. ”
― William Faulkner

“One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying -- trying as hard as you can -- which is a good thing.”
― Robin McKinley

“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”
― Mario Vargas-Llosa

“I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.”
― Rob Thurman

“Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.”
― Neil Gaiman

“You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
― Truman Capote

“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.”
― J.K. Rowling

“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."

(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)”
― D.H. Lawrence, Letters

“And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.”
― Dorothy Parker

“I write to find out what I'm talking about.”
― Edward Albee

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.”
― Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“They say that I am a poet
I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle
emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on
distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for
that matter as to whether I ever get my point across
or my love”
― Saul Williams

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward.

A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.”
― Tennessee Williams

“As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.”
― Paul Rudnick

“I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow