Best moments & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Of course you have memories, and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me.”

Feels Writing Moments Stories Reality Courses Memories Boys Degrees Understood Adam Convincing

Author:Amelie Nothomb

“I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.”

Writing Firsts Moments Use Bars Advertising Journalism Load Truck Workshops Chauffeurs Writing Workshop

Author:Dennis Lehane

“I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.”

Writing Believe Wells Moments Literature Pleasure Don't Believe

Author:Nora Roberts

“There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer'.”

Writing Moments Feelings Desire Pieces Nice Ego Really Nice Good Writers Outgrowing

Author:George Saunders

“The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange.”

“Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful.”

Thinking Needs Giving Should Writing Littles Doe Moments Asks Found Voice Can Do Natural Advice Prove Rhythm Tinkering

Author:Jorge Luis Borges

“The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.”

Source: Nightmares & Dreamscapes

“Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words.”

World Writing I Can Moments Joy Grief Metaphor Nightmare Cash Mills Burnout Burn Out

Author:Grant Morrison

“I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.”

Writing I Can War Play Moments Stories Wanted Remember Fire Crosses Democratic Caught Endless Obsessed Republic Congo Endless War Democratic Republic

Author:Lynn Nottage

“It is a little out of touch to presume that someone wants to follow your every observation and insight over the course of hundreds of pages without any sort of payoff. That's why writing isn't a one-way street. You have to give something back: an interesting plot, a surprise, a laugh, a moment of tenderness, a mystery for the reader to piece together.”

Way Want Giving Writing Littles Moments Together Courses Interesting Laughing Pieces Mystery Streets Reader Pages Surprise Insight Observation One Way Plot Tenderness Payoff

Author:Christopher Bollen

“Everyday, the mail brings the thousands of letters, and you hand over to Me personally hundreds more. Yet, I do not take the help of anyone else, even to open the envelopes. For, you write to me intimate details of your personal problems, believing that I alone will read them and having implicit confidence in Me. You write, each one only a single letter, that makes for Me a huge bundle a day; and I have to go through all of them. You may ask how I manage it? Well I do not waste a single moment.”

Writing Believe Wells May Moments Helping Problem Hands Asks Huge Waste Letters Everyday Details Manage Intimate Mail Single Mom Envelopes Bundles Implicit Personal Problems

Author:Sathya Sai Baba

“For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.”

Men Writing Two Enough Moments Literature Creation He Man Concur

Author:Matthew Arnold

“When you suffer, you can look deeply at your situation and find the many blessings that are already surrounding you. It is wonderful to sit with a pen and paper and write down all the conditions for happiness that are already there, already available to you right in this moment.”

Writing Looks Moments Motivational Suffering Situation Wonderful Conditions Blessing Paper Available Pens Many Blessings

Book:Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life

Source: Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life

“The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.”

Writing Moments Alive Ready Alcohol Preserves Novelists Capture Live In The Moment Diaries Preoccupation

Author:Anais Nin

“I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!”

Writing Moments Happens Song Sex Careers Five Week Exciting Block Writer's Block

Author:Loudon Wainwright III

“My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it.”

“It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing -- to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos -- of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings -- in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, "This is I!”

Writing Trying Persons Ends Whole Moments Feelings Action Memories Reader Despair Chaos Wide Rage Unhappy Reactions Vain Association Gestures Jungle Always Trying Action And Reaction

Book:Blue Voyage: A Novel

Source: Blue Voyage: A Novel

“In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.”

“Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!”

Knows Way Writing Persons Done Moments Truth Lying Desire Speak Deals Emotion Fiction Events Details Length Peculiar Packs Inventing Fiction Writers Devious

Book:The Left Hand of Darkness

Source: The Left Hand of Darkness

“All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.”

Way Writing Moments Corners Stores Ice Cream Ice Cream Melting

Author:William Gibson

“Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed.”

“As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K." - a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets - I AM AN ANTICHRIST - Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today - listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang - my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.”

“There's something about being there, on the set, in costume, in the moment, where you start to get a feel for the scene, which is not the same as sitting in your office writing it.”

Feels Writing Moments Scene Office Sitting Costumes Being There

Author:Lionel Wigram

“I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing - I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project - it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.”

Needs Writing Ideas Ends Whole Moments Facts Wanted Hate Economy Succeed Projects I Hate Absolutes Nightmare Ritual New Projects

Author:Slavoj Žižek

“Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.”

Knows Writing Moments Fiction Childhood Particular Normal Unusual Life Experience Bizarre Strangeness

Author:Kelly Link

“Everything happens as though I were only one of the particular existences of some great incomprehensible and central being.... Sometimes this great totality of life appears to me so dramatically beautiful that it plunges me into ecstasy. But more often it seems like a monstrous beast that penetrates and surpasses me and which is everywhere, within me and outside me.... And terror grips and envelops me more powerfully from moment to moment.... My only way out is to write, to make others aware of it, so as not to have to feel all of it alone, to get rid of however small a portion of it.”

Way Life Feels Writing Sometimes Moments Seems Happens Beautiful Existence Particular Terror Things Happen Beast Ecstasy Portions Penetrate Monstrous Plunge Totality

Author:Arthur Adamov

“The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn't make it easy.”

Writing Moments Easy Emotional Melody

Author:Enya

“To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.”

Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson: The Adventurer and Idler

“Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.”

People Writing Ideas Moments Culture Memories Taste Right Now Embrace Appeals Evolve Remembered Aesthetic Culture Change Changes Over Time

Author:Chuck Palahniuk

“Every time I do a movie, I'm reading the script, or if it's something I have coming up, I'm reading the script, and I just spend hours and hours and days and weeks and months going over the script and just writing a lot of different ideas down, finding a little dialogue or just coming up with ideas for scenes and moments and all that kind of stuff.”

Ifs Writing Kind Littles Ideas Different Moments Reading Stuff Hours Week Months Scene Findings Scripts Dialogue Different Ideas

Author:Mark Wahlberg

“When you're writing a script you have the option to embellish on life or switch the order of events or make it generally more cinematic. I would stick too closely to my own experience and not necessarily think about the fact that it needs to have an event happen. Realising that I could channel my own experience into a story that was slightly more cinematic was a very important moment for me - allowing myself to accept that the kind of screenwriting I'm doing is a work of fiction.”

Thinking Needs Writing Kind Important Moments Facts Stories Happens Order My Own Fiction Accepting Events Sticks Scripts Allowing Realising Screenwriting Cinematic Important Moments

Author:Lena Dunham

“There is a lot of catarsis that passes itself off as art or comedy and I'm kind of critical of that. I think that just because you bare your soul or underwear or private moments it doesn't , or necessarily make for entertainment, or good writing, or funny writing.”

Thinking Writing Kind Art Soul Moments Comedy Entertainment Critical Your Soul Underwear Good Writing

Author:Mindy Kaling

“I can pinpoint the moment when my first band recorded, when I was 14 and 15 years old. I always enjoyed writing songs and playing, but there was something about going in and capturing it that felt very Zen and perfect for me. A light switch went on and I just realized that's where my musical capacity was the most suited. I just followed on blind faith that that was like a calling for me.”

Writing Years Firsts I Can Moments Light Song Felt Perfect Calling Band Capacity Blind Musical Enjoyed Writing Songs Blind Faith Just Realized Perfect For Me

Author:John Congleton

“Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction”

Writing Firsts Moments Earth Lasts Mother Given Careers Novel Happened Wind Months West Satisfaction East Significant Forty Housewife Manuscripts Life Happens Good Earth

Author:Pearl S. Buck

“A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing.”

Writing Moments Waiting Minutes Quiet Elements Messages Letters Ill Timelessness Letter Writing Quiet Moments

Author:Lois Wyse

“One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment.”

Writing Moments Problem Food Cooking Culinary Recipes Cookbook

Author:Thomas Keller

“Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - how good how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry.”

Writing Moments Hands Pleasure Talking Food Fine Mouths Cooking Culinary Throat Delicious Strawberries Nectarines

Book:The Complete Works of John Keats

Source: The Complete Works of John Keats

“Writing is the great skill, the creative skill. The acting is more an interpretative skill. And the thrill for me is the moment when I think of something. And then the challenge is how to get that funny idea to work in terms of the structure and that kind of thing, which is - and that's what I really love doing.”

Thinking Writing Kind Ideas Moments Term Challenges Acting Creative Skills Structure Thrill

Author:John Cleese

“Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.”

Writing Art Moments Sides Term Quiet Findings Day To Day Consuming Chaotic Making Time Day Life Day To Day Life Time Consuming Quiet Moments

Author:Sarah Kay

“Every moment I choose to write about is one I have deemed important enough to dwell inside of and share with others. I am holding this moment up to the light and saying, "Wow, will you look at that?"”

Writing Looks Important Enough Moments Light Share Wow

Author:Sarah Kay

“The language itself is what gets me interested in writing. It's weird to me that words exist. Never a dull moment with words. They're a layer between our minds and the physical reality around us, obviously, but the layer seems like it's always in flux, like an asteroid belt, constantly moving.”

Writing Mind Moments Reality Seems Moving Language Dull Layers Belts Flux Asteroids Constantly Moving

Author:Aaron Belz

“Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.”

Way Writing Book Moments Character Moving Novel Structure Engaged Unpredictable

Author:David Bezmozgis

“Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of distraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses.”

Knows Writing Moments Given Felt Forget Moved Wheels Passages Distraction Scholar Organs Pipe Lapses Disregarded Herons Pipe Organs

Author:Lucio Russo

“What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where Mother was a Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough.”

Ifs Writing Mean Doe Made Sometimes Moments Used Mother Girl White Laughing Alive Wife Cry Tears Tough Decided Nuclear Tragic Scratches Messy Antigone Writing Poems Nuclear Families

Author:Juliana Spahr

“I'm very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work it's way into the piece.”

Thinking Men Way Writing Years I Can Two Ideas Moments Pieces Four Two Years Working It Four Years

Author:Quentin Tarantino

“I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.”

Writing Trying Kind Moments Hands Process Brain Concerned Flow Guts Pens Writing Process

Author:Quentin Tarantino

“You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay.”

Writing Believe Moments Essays Blogs Solemnity

Book:Nora Ephron: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

Source: Nora Ephron: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“Writing for the theater is a whole different can of fish. The music now has the responsibility of so many things. The plot could be giving you different views of the character; the emotional highlights of a moment.”

Giving Writing Different Whole Moments Character Views Responsibility Emotional Theater Fishes Plot Highlights Different Views

Author:Frank Wildhorn

“Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.”

Writing Children Has Beens Ideas Moments Age Today Sex Cases Middle Subjects Century Speech Adults Wide Range Contracts Freedom Of Speech Scope Twentieth Century Banned Obscene Kinky

Author:Lawrence M. Friedman

“Consider for a moment what you pay attention to all day long. What seems important to you, what do you take for granted and hardly attend to at all? Write it down. Do not judge your answers. Be honest and simple. As you keep track all week long, you'll be amazed at what claims your attention, what you give your precious life force to.”

Moments Quotes

Related topics

Moments Quotes