#writ

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#life-and-living #life-lessons #writing-life #life

[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

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey ↗

— John Cheever

#life

Human life is fiction's only theme. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#fiction #writing #life

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#writing #life

Writing is like life: it goes on. ↗

— Marty Rubin

#writing #life

I never write the storyline ahead of the novel and stick to it like glue. I prefer my writing to be organic. It takes on a life of it's own. ↗

— Airambooksie

#quotes-about-writing #quotes-for-writers #life

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life. ↗

— Betsy Lerner

#life

For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse. ↗

— Peter Ackroyd

#history #reader #time #writer #life

I think Hemingway's titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary. ↗

— Sylvia Beech

#life