A Quote by David Shields

You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?

David Shields

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About Anyone Life Lives Ordinary Ordinary Life Plenty Think Torment Trouble Write

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David Shields
American - Author
Born: July 22, 1956

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.

Paul Theroux

I think you write only out of a great trouble. A trouble of excitement, a trouble of enlargement, a trouble of displacement in yourself.

Eleanor Clark

The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?

Jeanette Winterson

It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree?

Kay Ryan

I think the first trick to writing a feminist work is to write plenty of women. That way you get to write characters, instead of worrying about paradigms.

Leigh Bardugo

You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'

Elizabeth McCracken

Because I write realistic fiction, I generally don't think about fixing anyone - I just think about how I want to feel at the end of the book - And I try to write toward that feeling.

Jacqueline Woodson

I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.

Joseph Campbell

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

Jeanette Winterson

I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.

Jesse Kellerman

Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.

John William Draper

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

Alice Sebold

I don't believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I've been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man.

Beth Orton

Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.

Rajneesh

When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.

Judy Blume

When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.

Howard Jacobson

A Quote by David Shields

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