...Quotables @ Bookshelf ...

LelaRentaka7

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

LelaRentaka7

“I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

LelaRentaka7

“No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

seribulan

LelaRentaka7

“People who are prone to sadness are more likely to pick up a pen.”
― Lang Leav, Sad Girls

LelaRentaka7

“In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.”
― Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales: and Other Stories

LelaRentaka7

“Do you write novels?" I said.

"Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.”
― Pam Houston, Waltzing the Cat

LelaRentaka7

“All the time she writing the world had continued.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

LelaRentaka7

“Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.”
― M.G. Marsh, Letters

LelaRentaka7

“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.”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

LelaRentaka7

“Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

LelaRentaka7

“Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.”
― Pierre Abélard, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

LelaRentaka7

“Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?”
― David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business

LelaRentaka7

“Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

LelaRentaka7

“It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

LelaRentaka7

“Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward”
― J.R. Ward, The Black Dagger Brotherhood: An Insider's Guide

LelaRentaka7

“Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

LelaRentaka7

“The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.”
― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man

LelaRentaka7

“In a way, I was safe writing”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

LelaRentaka7

“Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet