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Writing Philosophy Quotes

Browse 168 quotes about Writing Philosophy.

Writing Philosophy Quotes

“Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind.”

“Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.”

“Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.”

“Each of us, along with our ancestors, inhabits the same cosmos. When we tell stories, we enter the stream of human consciousness; we take with us into the Ring of Time the people whom we crossed paths with in our earthly sojourn.”

“The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.”

“It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White? There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.”

“Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.”

“Each of us wages a private battle to thrive. Whenever a person fully immerses oneself in life’s aromatic flower garden of pleasures and encounters life’s warship of armor-plated rigors, they blend and bend to make reasonable accommodations for surviving. Scripted and unscripted encounters with superior militant forces bruise us mightily and eventually cut us to the core. Every person’s life contains a minefield of obstacles that function as potential barriers to achieving our ultimate manifestation. The expended labor of continuously hefting oneself over one contentious hurdle after another is what leads a conscientious person onto the path of needing to write in order to create emotional poultices to ameliorate painful wounds.”

“There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books....My mind is a body that's a mind.”

“Words are the residue that I was there, that I loved my wife, that I kissed my children goodnight, that I sacrificed my life for them. Words are a curse. Life is a curse. Words escape life. Life escapes words. What in God's name am I? How does someone name a God? What is it to name yourself?”

“An act of consciousness always adopts a point of view by classifying world happenings into favorable, unfavorable, or neutral categories. The consciousness is an observer, reporter, and responder to world events. Writers are perhaps the most conscious observers; they are constantly examining a continuous sequence of events transpiring in the temporal world and partitioning these occurrences into distinct cerebral units. When we read the works of an author, we ask ourselves what is the author’s pathos. When we tell our personal stories, we also adopt a point of view, and reveal our own melody of mental thoughts that describe the gravitonic center of the psyche.”

“Language is our identity tool and by using experience, observation, and imagination, we each discover the words that give voice to our lives. To tell our stories is the human method of perforating our isolation tanks, the means to encapsulate what we previously learned, and the mechanism that allows us to enter the universal dialogue of compassion. Sharing the pandemonium of our life’s stories full of grime, love, noise, and steeped in emotional chaos is the act that ultimately binds us to our family, friends, and community. All lovers know each other stories. Farmers, villagers, big city hobnobs, and the citizens from all nations share a conjoined thread through storytelling that seriously investigates the collective human condition.”

“Unlike uplifting light fiction, narrative nonfiction’s trammeled territory provides no safe room where an unnerved writer can banish their unpleasant memories. Narrative nonfiction must make use of our sour feelings, pungent memories, gloomy thoughts, and other indigestible nougats of a black disposition. Given a choice between experiencing nothing and inconsolable grief, the writer will always take the epic grief that composes the grandeur of human tragedy. Without a mask of consolation to shunt the unseemly undercurrent that disturbs them, writers whom dabble in memoir or personal essay writing must swallow hard and make use of the entire range of their toxic temperament. The tonicity of narrative nonfiction need not be bleak, but it must be true to the full panoply of both positive and negative emotions that heave through the writer’s torrid veins.”

“You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise”

“Those stories- myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature- are always with us. Always in us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to them whenever we want.”

“When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person’s conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.”

“(In reply to the question, 'Would you like some suggestions for a plot for your next book?') There are three problems with getting plot suggestions from other people. The first is that ideas are the easy part of writing; finding the time and energy to get them down on paper is the hard part. I have plenty of ideas already. Which brings me to the second problem: the ideas that excite you, the ones you think would make a terrific book, are not necessarily the same ideas that excite me. And if a writer isn't excited about an idea, she generally doesn't turn out a terrific book, even if the idea is terrific. And the third problem with my using your suggestions is that, theoretically, you could sue me if I did, and that tends to make publishers nervous, which makes it hard to sell a book. So thank you, but no.”

“In looking for poems and poets, don't dwell on the boundaries of style, or time, or even of countries and cultures. Think of yourself rather as one member of a single, recognizable tribe. Expect to understand poems of other eras and other cultures. Expect to feel intimate with the distant voice. The differences you will find between then and now are interesting. They are not profound. (p. 11)”

“A writer’s voice emanates from their interest and compulsions that absorbs them completely. Only by fully committing himself or herself to a pet subject or issue can the writer develop a thematic tone that speaks to other people with authority and serenity. The quality of their literary voice is the crucial part of the writer’s legitimacy, and their authenticity cannot come from mimicking other writers’ style, but must evolve naturally from their inner sanctity and must flow effusively from an inner necessity.”

“At some point in life, we all feel burden, oppressed if you will, by the knowledge of our existence. Addressing our deepest anguish and greatest fear establishes the bedrock of any artistic effort, and ultimately represents the thin line that separates contemplative humankind from all other forms of animal life. A person with an artistic bent embraces the inherent anxiety of living and attempts to express anguish in a telling format in order to assist other people grapple with the baffle of being: awareness of the absurdity of striving in a world where the only thing guaranteed for a person with many cravings is hellish life of attachment and wanting. When we rise above the deceptions and temptations of an egocentric mind, we encounter our spiritual essence.”

“A personal essay is probably the most malleable form of writing style, because it enables a writer to engage in a felicitous conversation with oneself. The more formal rules that govern academic writing are largely inapplicable to personal essay writing. Personal essays are free from the forbidding cadence and rigid structure of thesis writing. A personal essay’s lilt reflects the movement of the writer’s mind.”

“An essayist’s tone can be grim or playful, somber or teasing, and critical or uplifting. Unlike a thesis that a writer drafts to establish, verify, and support a proposition, a person primarily writes a personal essay to please oneself by questioning, probing, and investigating the mysterious, anomalous, and the unknowable wreckage of our humanity. A writer frequently initiates a personal essay by simply clearing their throat.”

“Evocative memories seared onto the writer’s unconscious mind forms the essential cadence that brokers a writer’s telltale, shadowy light. Floundering in the commodious darkness, the writer’s seeks to discover a ray of lightness that inhabits the darkest recesses of their fitful humanity.”

“Objective motives and subjective compulsions that incite a person to write is the decisive element in defining the writer’s unique voice. Anyone who does not understand oneself or is unwilling to ferret out their own buried, true identity and publicly unmask the hidden stranger that resides within us all will never be a person who can bridge a connection with other people who share similar thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs. Lacking critical discernment, this want-a-be writer will remain a cosseted imposter, playing a coldhearted game of charades. If a person is unwilling to peel back the craggy mask that we conceal ourselves behind and explore the seeds of inner awareness wrapped inside the enigma of doubt engulfing all people, one can still aim to be a writer of nonfiction or technical journals. Creative writing, in sharp contrast, is for the intrepid cliff dwellers, the recluses willing to mine the soft belly of their internal psychosis.”

“Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel ‘Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).”

“The rewards generated from writing materialize at all stages of the work. Simply spending time organizing a person’s thoughts is edifying. Revising thoughts lead to clarification of conflicting thoughts and greater precision of thought. Finishing a piece of writing about hurtful personal experiences allows a person to examine it for everything that the writer learned.”

“I am what I have ever read”

“Words are felt bodily presences. They take up residence in our connective tissue, in the inner sanctum of our cells and the rapid fire of neurons. They await our grasp and their play upon the page. They await our writing, our consideration and gaze. They want to be touched by writing and partake in one form becoming another form, a flesh body shedding a skin for a text body.”

“The principal theme of any autobiography revolves around the brushwork of self-transformation, the freeing of the self from the strictures of self-imposed limitations, fears, and doubts. Autobiographical writing represents a heroic journey towards self-discovery; it enables us to get to know ourselves, and initiate a new phase where we begin thinking of the needs of other people.”