...Quotables @ Bookshelf ...

LelaRentaka7

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

LelaRentaka7

“End with an image and don't explain.”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

LelaRentaka7

“Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work.
Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don’t want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book.”

― Bernard Schaffer, Whitechapel: The Final Stand Of Sherlock Holmes

LelaRentaka7

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

LelaRentaka7

And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

LelaRentaka7

“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

LelaRentaka7

“You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.”
― Jennifer Echols, Love Story

LelaRentaka7

“In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. 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 my job for me."

[Letter to Joan Lancaster, 26 June 1956]”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

LelaRentaka7

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

LelaRentaka7

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

seribulan

Beloved

Author: Toni Morrison

Year: 1987

“You are your best thing”

LelaRentaka7

“The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.”
― Seamus Heaney, Station Island

LelaRentaka7

“Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

LelaRentaka7

“When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.”
― Betsy Byars, The Moon and I

LelaRentaka7

“She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.”
― Sándor Márai, Embers

LelaRentaka7

“If she did experience it--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of  desire or love than literary curiosity.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

LelaRentaka7

“I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Wake

LelaRentaka7

" The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

LelaRentaka7

"And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

LelaRentaka7

“My pen shall heal, not hurt.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs