885 Quotes About Writing-advice

Writing is emblematic art form, which means that the book will never be any greater than the writer’s ability to perceive, classify, and describe the external world, think abstractedly, and organize the material that structures the content of their mind.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The only way of making this perilous passage is by looking at it as a pilgrimage.

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else's life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.

You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

As the soul wanes, form appears.

O público quer saber como é estar vivo na ponta da faca do agora. O que significa ser um ser humano hoje?

Posicionar o público não é algo novo. Shakespeare não chamou sua peça de Hamlet, chamou-a de A Tragédia de Hamlet, Príncipe da Dinamarca. Ele deu a comédias títulos como Muito Barulho Por Nada e A Comédia dos Erros, de modo que, a cada tarde no Teatro Globe, o público elisabetano estava psicologicamente preparado para chorar ou rir.