Quotes about Writing – Part One

• There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbur

• So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

• The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Ni

• Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow

• A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy

• And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath

• I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

• I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

• If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

• What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, “All Trivia,” Afterthoughts, 1931

• The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. ~Norbet Platt

• It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~Vita Sackville-West

• Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O’Brien

• Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very;” your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

• I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener (my favorite quote)
  

• The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. ~Mark Twain

• The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

• Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938

• Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth

• The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov

• Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

• Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Emme Woodhull-Bäche

• Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. ~Orson Scott Card

• A metaphor is like a simile. ~Author Unknown

• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain (Another of my favorite quotes)

• The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. ~Jules Renard, “Diary,” February 1895

• Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. ~Author Unknown

• A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. ~Karl Kraus

• A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, “Every Man’s Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else,” The Dame School of Experience, 1920

• When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can. ~Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842

• I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener

• If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov

• I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries

• Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

• A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

• Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

• To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote, McCall’s, November 1967

• A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. ~John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 10 September 1961

• I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. ~English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University

• Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~Hannah Arendt

Now THIS is funny

Found this post on blacktable.com. Looks like it’s a few years old…but so funny.

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INCOMPETENT ASS GROPING: So, I’m in the midst of hour two of the Chinatown bus ride from Boston to New York, when I notice that my ass feels … not right. I decide that it’s probably numb and continue reading my magazine. Twenty minutes later, the ‘off’ sensation remains. Thinking that I’m maybe sitting on something, I reach my fingers back … and make contact with someone else’s fingers. As it turns out, the man sitting behind me had seen fit to reach his hand between the two parts of the bus seat and grope my ass. I was mad and I felt violated and all that, but I was also baffled. Who would think to reach between the seat parts on the fucking Chinatown bus? Who? Furthermore, the man had gotten on the bus after I had, which means that he hadn’t even seen my ass. Why would you want to touch an ass you’ve never even seen? Finally, due to his choice of access method, he couldn’t even touch my ass with more than his fingertips. His actions could be better described as “poking” than “groping.” He couldn’t even cop a decent feel. To recap: Costs: having to reach your hand between the Chinatown bus seats and touching an unknown ass which could be totally gross. Benefits: Sort of getting to poke someone’s butt.

Sir, you lose.

Leila Cohan

Pounding out the meat…

I find that I really, really, really have to be in the mood to write. Really. Sometimes that raggeddy ass muse of mine is no where to be found, leaving me to fend for myself in a jungle full of verbs, punctuation, and sentence structure. And even though I absolutely love the process of stitching just the right word into just the right sentence in order to make just the right emotion, image, or idea fill the page-I often find the process similar to tenderizing meat.

Strange analogy perhaps, but in taking a hammer and smacking a piece of raw meat into submission, I find the desired result–a tender steak–a hit or miss process. Sometimes, I’m really into pummeling the slab of dead flesh into mush, thereby turning it into the most tender, most delicious filet mignon ever. But other times, I just give it a smack or two, throw it on the grill and live with the results.

Guess perhaps it’s not my muse I’m missing.

Could be I’m just plain lazy.

SunRocket VOIP is toast…thanks Craig Szemple…for saving my as*.

Well, it’s official. SunRocket, a VOIP company has gone under. I just got through reading dozens of blog entries about how their customers have been left with no phone service and no warning. It seems that SunRocket ran out of money and closed up shop. And thousands of their customers have to scramble to find new phone service so that they can reconnect with the world. Not to mention all those who prepaid a couple of hundred dollars for service they will never receive. Seems that money is lost along with the service.

And I was a customer of theirs until about 9 months ago when Craig Francis Szemple, the subject of my True Crime book, and I started to communicate. And he saved me from the same fate.

VOIP phone services cannot receive ‘collect’ phone calls. Not sure why, but they can’t. And prisoners can ONLY make ‘collect’ phone calls. So if I was going to interview Szemple over the phone for my book it would have to be on a normal ‘landline’, not an internet VOIP phone.

So I canceled SunRocket, had a regular phone line installed and Szemple and I ‘chat’ every Monday at 1:30 in the afternoon. Collect.

Yup…he sure saved my as*.

And so it goes…