#writing

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration. ↗

— Chris Van Allsburg

#asking #asking questions #call #comes #creating

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone. ↗

— Tori Amos

#i #just #living #living room #me

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics. ↗

— David Amram

#authority #blake #classic #ginsberg #had

The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality. ↗

— Jennifer Aniston

#attracted #based #good #good writing #i

I can't remember writing any of the songs that I've written. ↗

— Fiona Apple

#i #remember #songs #writing #written

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#evolved #failures #into #process #ratio

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable ↗

— Jacques Barzun

#writing-craft

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers? ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#consistency #details #dramatic-effect #facts #sherlock-holmes

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten. ↗

— Charles Frazier

#words #writing #holy-spirit

I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#good-books #great-writing #reading #writing-books