Top 1200 Prose Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

I think my goal is to find a way to spend all of my time writing. I mean, sort of; true success is I'm doing nothing but writing if I do my job correctly.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

I'm writing all the time, I never stopped writing.

Writing-and this is the big secret-wants to be written. Writing loves a writer the way God loves a true devotee. Writing will fill your heart if you let it. It will fill your pages and help to fill your life.

The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities.

To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.

I don't let myself believe in writer's block. I feel very strongly writing is habit as much as an art or a craft. And if you write crap, you're still writing.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.

I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

I actually never liked writing on my own or in school until I'd had my blog for a while and realized I'd been writing every day for years.

I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.

I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.

Read a lot, finding out what kind of writing turns you on, in order to develop a criterion for your own writing. And then trust it-and yourself.

I didn't understand that TV writing wasn't writing; it was pitching.

With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

You know when you're writing, and it's just you and the computer screen, and you never think that anyone is ever going to read it... you're able to say private things when you're writing.

I'm always writing - its what I like to do. But when I'm not writing, I'm reading.

I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.

Academic writing is such a different way of writing.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing.

I feel like you become a songwriter when you claim that it's sort of like a switch flipped, and you're always writing. Even in your sleep, you're always thinking about it in the back of your mind. The true writing - when you're officially writing - that's just when its front of mind, but its always there. You're always listening for a hook.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.

I believe in myself enough to not get hung up on what other people are doing, or what I should be writing, or the nature of how I'm writing. I'm just able.

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

Certain people want to binge-watch stuff, and they want 10 solid hours of whatever, not realizing that writing 10 hours of quality television is a exhausting experience. Writing an hour and a half is a warm hug compared to writing 10 hours of television.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.

I enjoyed writing stories whenever there was call to do it at school, and started writing bad poetry when I was doing my GCSEs - like most people, I think.

And I love writing. I've always loved writing.

Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require time and money. But I say this honestly and somewhat harshly – if you’re not willing to prioritize your writing, perhaps you should do something else?

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

in writing, sex doesn't matter; it's the writing that matters.

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

Writing only leads to more writing.