#process

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it ↗

— Karl Popper

#end #finish #learning #letting-go #the-end

Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche. ↗

— Julia Cameron

#writing-process #life

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged. ↗

— Koren Zailckas

#emotions #families #family #family-therapy #memoir

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#writing-advice #writing-craft #writing-life #writing-process #life

Writing starts with living. —Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing ↗

— L.L. Barkat

#writing-advice #writing-life #writing-process #life

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#expectations #ideals #inspirational #inspirational-life #inspirational-living

Question for your life: If we were to kiss passionately for 30 minutes, would you refill my oxygen tank in the process? ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#oxygen #passion #process #question #life

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#images #imagination #senses #writing #imagination

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#creative-process #fictional-universe #writing #life