“When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.” ― Jean Cocteau
@patverducci.bsky.social
“A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.” ― Friedrich Dürrenmatt
“Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.” ― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.” ― John Waters
"That's the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, but when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn't just walk off the mound and weep." Raymond Chandler
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” ― George Orwell, Why I Write
Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone writes "I woke up and it was all a dream." She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. David Mitchell
“...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to tell them that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.” Ursula K. Le Guin
“When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.” ― Isaac Bashevis Singer
“For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.” ― Eudora Welty, On Writing
“Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.” ― Anne Sexton
“Can you imagine what it was like to write in a library, where you could run upstairs and feel the ambiance of your loved writers, and take books off the shelf and discover things that you might want to put in your book as a quote, and then run back down and finish writing another page.”Ray Bradbury
“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good” ― Thornton Wilder
“CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon. JOEL: I know. CLEMENTINE: What do we do? JOEL: Enjoy it.” ― Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
“...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.” ― Angelica Banks
“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” ― Stephen King
“There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.” ― Diane Duane
“There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.” ― H.L. Mencken
And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of a knight on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.” Ezra Pound
“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” ― Marcel Proust
“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” ― Truman Capote
“Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing” Guy De Maupassant
“You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.” ― Jessica Mitford
“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.” ― Honoré de Balzac
“...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.” ― Angelica Banks
“That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.” ― Kelly Barnhill
“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." ― John Irving
“It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.” Ann Patchett,