Best faces & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.”

“My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.”

People Writing Wells Enough Facts Faces Difficult Talking Ambition Block Mysterious Prescriptions Hysteria Writer's Block Writing Well

Author:Thomas Mallon

“I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.”

Feels Writing Trying Character Stories Eye Faces Term Expression Mouths Noses Theme Plot Discussing Story Writing

Book:Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.”

Writing Faces Novel Inevitable Spit Obsolescence

Author:John Green

“When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.”

Writing Looks Faces Moving Laughing Cry Fool

Author:Zoe Kazan

“[Her] love and tenderness ... gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”

Love Writing Play Lasts Faces Understanding Four Pity Tenderness Romantic Love Sweet Love Faith In Love

Author:Eugene O'Neill

“There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

Should Writing Different Problem Faces Young Courses Creative Generations Taught Solve Creative Writing Seminars Previous Generations

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.”

People Writing Believe Art Book Done Whole Faces Achievement Liars Sensible Sane Great Art Solemn Brevity

Author:Georg C. Lichtenberg

“I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.”

People Men Writing May Book Ideas Faces Literature Known Vision Genius Advertising Prophecy Face To Face Writing A Book Living On Unborn

Book:The House of Twenty Seven Gardens

Source: The House of Twenty Seven Gardens

“I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”

Thinking Men Writing Matter Faces Written Land Definitions Suspects Pens Strokes Signatures Chopping

Book:A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There

Source: A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There

“To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it.”

Writing Shows Faces

Book:Ways of Going Home

Source: Ways of Going Home

“Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.”

Writing Home Today Faces Terrible Workers Casts Clothings Oaks Dusk Womens Day Returning Home Nonentity

Book:The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams

Source: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams

“In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not there if you want to keep writing good code.”

Ifs Want Writing Kind Faces Code Nothingness Entropy

Author:Karl Lehenbauer

“I never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work, every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul. Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I'd been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my career, I wouldn't have focused on the writing. If you don't write, you're not read. If you're not read, you don't sell. So that's my Master Plan, I guess. Write the books, let the agent agent, the editor edit, the publisher publish.”

“An idea is only an idea if it causes unease, debate and reflection. By that standard, Thomas Homer-Dixon's concept of an 'ingenuity gap' is truly a new idea. I can think of no other new concept that so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization than the 'ingenuity gap'. Homer-Dixon has found a way to unite all of our concerns about economics, war, population growth, complexity, etc. under a single heading. He is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience.”

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Source: Orwell and Politics

“The number one metaphor I have in my mind for writing a screenplay is that...you're trying to climb a mountain blindfolded. And the funny thing about that is, you think, 'Okay, that's hard because you're climbing up a rock face, and you don't know where you're going, and you don't know where the top is, you can't see what's below you...' But actually the hardest part about climbing a mountain blindfolded is just finding the mountain.”

Thinking Knows Writing Trying Mind Hard Faces Numbers Rocks Mountain Findings Okay Metaphor Hardest Climbs Climbing Funny Things Screenplays Climbing Mountain Blindfolded Climbing Up

Author:Michael Arndt

“The more I read, the less I admire modern theology. the more I study the productions of the new schools of theological teachers, the more I marvel that men and women can be satisfied with such writings. There is a vagueness, a mistiness, a shallowness, an indistinctness, a superficiality, an aimlessness, a hollowness about the literature of the 'broader and kinder systems', as they are called, which to my mind stamps their origin on their face. They are of the earth, earthy.”

“When I was a young girl salmon fishing with my father in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State I used to lean out over the water and try to look past my own face, past the reflection of the boat, past the sun and darkness, down to where the fish were surely swimming. I made up charm songs and word-hopes to tempt the fish, to cause them to mean biting my hook. I believed they would do it if I asked them well and patiently and with the right hope. I am writing my poems like this. I have used the fabric and the people of my life as the bait.”

“Many a man has walked up to the opportunity for which he has long been preparing himself, looked it full in the face, and then begun to get cold feet... when it comes to betting on yourself and your power to do the thing you know you must do or write yourself down a failure, you're a chicken-livered coward if you hesitate.”

Ifs Knows Men Writing Long Faces Opportunity Feet Cold Chickens Coward Preparing Betting Cold Feet

Author:B. C. Forbes

“a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.”

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)

“Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor - people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always - or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumor, and rumors are hard to pin down.”

People Ifs Thinking Men Writing Hard Reason Faces Found Social Bits Careers Media New York Couple Window Pressure Glasses Social Media Plates Rumor Pins Respectable Once Upon A Time Exterior

Author:Margaret Atwood

“Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.”

Writing Facts Faces Certain Lost Process Natural Levels Views Civilization Fundamentals Saved Optimistic Selection Best Work Natural Selection Regression

Book:The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn

Source: The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn

“I was most confusedly in love. ... Even though I resolved not to think of him, his face would keep appearing between me and a book I tried to read, or his voice would suddenly sound instead of the words I tried to write on a page. ... I found love annoying and uncomfortable, like fetters, until I got used to it.”

Thinking Writing Book Faces Used Found Sound Voice Pages Uncomfortable Annoying Appearing Fetters Found Love

Author:Nora Waln

“New Haven cultivates ... an open gloom that seems happy to acknowledge disrepair and the superfluity of appearance. ... I realized that what cramped the town was the weight of unwritten volumes: they scored lines of unfinished writing on every second face that walked the streets.”

Writing Seems Faces Lines Cities Streets Havens Weight Towns Appearance I Realized Acknowledge Volume Gloom Unfinished Every Second Unwritten

Author:Sara Suleri

“I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.”

Writing Running Faces Brain Ears Ties Necks Hats Gray

Author:Maya Angelou

“Life's so brief,” she goes on. “We're, at every juncture, staring mortality in the face. It's the very least we can do if we think it will be of any interest or value, to share the past. And although mine's been crooked, it's also been splendid. It's taught me to be vulnerable and humble, to write this book.”

Ifs Thinking Writing Book Past Faces Values Interest Can Do Share Mines Taught Goes On Humble Vulnerable Staring Mortality Splendid Crooked Juncture

Author:Kate Mulgrew

“A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I dont know what they think.”

People Thinking Knows Writing Faces Behinds Audience Comic Comedian Feedback Comic Strips Stand Up Comedian

Author:Stephan Pastis

“When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.”

Feels Writing Looks Past Faces Moving Dies Father Memories Boys Imagine Son Becoming Standing Sight Moved Nostalgia Boyhood

Book:The Invention of Solitude

Source: The Invention of Solitude

“The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.”

Writing Faces Challenges Fiction Careers Reader Expectations Meetings Genre

Author:Julia Quinn

“Any woman who wishes to be an intellectual, to write non-fiction, to deal with theory, faces a lot of discrimination coming her way and perhaps even self-doubt because there aren't that many who've gone before you. And I think that the most powerful tool we can have is to be clear about our intent. To know what it is we want to do rather than going into institutions thinking that the institution is going to frame for us.”

Thinking Knows Way Want Writing Self Faces Wish Deals Powerful Fiction Gone Clear Doubt Theory Intellectual Tools Institutions Discrimination Most Powerful Non Fiction Self-doubt

Author:Bell Hooks

“I have a car business and if I had to do an estimate on my face, I would probably write it off.”

Ifs Writing Faces Car

Author:Jim Watt

“Anytime you can muster the fury to actually write in the face of the impossibility of writing, that's an achievement.”

Writing Faces Achievement Impossibility Fury Muster

Author:John Maus

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