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Sunday, December 19, 2010

Some writers on writing

from [source]

hindi ko alam kung anong maitutulong nito sa mundo. pero, eto. andito na ito eh. at andyan na yan dati pa. ikaw na ang bahala sa maari mong gawin sa mga ito (Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree to these, pero nafilter ko naman na, somehow, yung mga pinakahindi ko pinaniniwalaan. Pagpasensyahan na ang formatting, lalo pag nafeed sa FB):

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" / "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down." / "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
Kurt Vonnegut

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
Maya Angelou

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
Anaïs Nin

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for." Alice Walker

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
Henry David Thoreau

"Always be a poet, even in prose." Charles Baudelaire

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write." Rainer Maria Rilke

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
Dylan Thomas

"DWIGHT: Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people." Frank Miller

"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

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
Stephen King / Truman Capote (anu ba goodreads :L nambabluff ka ba?)

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." / "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule." Stephen King

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

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way." Ernest Hemingway

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody." / "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
Oscar Wilde

"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper." Ursula K. Le Guin

"You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism."
Warren Ellis (TRANSMETROPOLITAN ito, ano! Wasak talaga nun!)

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness." Franz Kafka

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." / "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. (--speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962)" John Steinbeck

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin." Jean-Paul Sartre

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." Virginia Woolf

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
Vladimir Nabokov

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God."
Sidney Sheldon

"The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world."
James Baldwin

"When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar." / "Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
William Faulkner

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance."
Thomas Pynchon

"Writing is both mask and unveiling." E.B. White

"What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else." Nadine Gordimer

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard." Neil Gaiman

"Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."
Walter Benjamin

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." Jack Kerouac

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way." Ray Bradbury

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." Albert Camus

"Every writer I know has trouble writing. " Joseph Heller

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." Gustave Flaubert

"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text." Umberto Eco

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul." Aldous Huxley

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth." Khaled Hosseini

"great writers are indecent people / they live unfairly / saving the best part for paper. / good human beings save the world / so that bastards like me can keep creating art, / become immortal. / if you read this after I am dead / it means I made it." Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing."
William Gibson

"Vigorous writing is concise." William Strunk

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell." / "All writing is filth." Antonin Artaud

(Tas naggoogle ulit ako para malaman nang ang somehow saktong words nito:)

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Bertolt Brecht

“The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.”
Karl Marx

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