Vivid Writing Quotes & Sayings

It takes extraordinary mental discipline to transmit human experience without perversion. Truth telling is unnatural. Lying is an important aspect of humanity. We lie to other people to prevent hurt feelings and we deceive ourselves in order to protect our noble sense of being a good person. Dishonesty and inaccuracy preserves our quest seeking uninterrupted personal pleasure. I shall eschew pleasure seeking and cultivate precision of mind and moral character that precious truth telling necessitates. Reading and writing, along with observing nature and studious reflection on vivid personal experiences is the process methodology that will bring me closest to discovering inviolate verity of existence and becoming a doyen for all the immaculate truth, beauty, and goodness in this world. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Helen Lowe writes wonderful stories, yes, but her work also speaks with lyricism to deeper questions of how we treat each other. With lovely prose that brings vivid life to her characters, she creates a universe with people we care about. This is an author with a gift for fantasy. — Catherine Asaro

I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I'd like to be. I guess I'd like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine? — Ann Zwinger

Stout was a leader - quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong, very thoughtful and remarkably innovative. Whether speaking or writing, he was economical with words, precise, vivid. One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed. Neither — Robert M. Edsel

Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that's still vivid in your memory. It doesn't have to be long - three pages, five pages - but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday's episode doesn't have to be related to Monday's episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don't be impatient to start writing your "memoir" - the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer's best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about - and what it's not about. — William Zinsser

With my sometimes blunt indecent vocabulary & very vivid imagination, I wonder if I should be writing "other" kinds of content. — April Mae Monterrosa

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. — John Gardner

Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word. — Jill Scott

I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today. — Nick Antosca

It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.'

'Maybe it reminds them of school,' she suggests. 'Didn't someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?'

'I don't know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it's so vivid. I'd definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.'

'Maybe it's not that much of a leap,' she says. — Paul Murray

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM. — Tiffany Madison

Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Sometimes a story catches your imagination so much it has to be told. That is what I love about writing. It lets the images in your mind burst forth into words drawing a vivid picture that takes you away on a journey that would otherwise be impossible. — S. E. Smith

Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose. — Arthur Smith

Two roads diverged in a wood, I took the one less travelled I'm patient so that's one less hassle If I dream it, I can live it I've seen the light with vivid imagery I need to write with fits of energy But it's hard tryin' to get where I'm goin' Without a hint or an omen It's too late to turn around Perseverance, gotta learn it now But I'm stubborn how Am I supposed to survive this rollercoaster hurtlin' to the ground? — Danny Denzongpa

I've always had a vivid imagination in terms of storytelling, but thankfully I learned early on that imagination can be stifled or enhanced by one's writing ability - what I call word work. My goal from then on was to make sure my writing skills were up to speed with my imagination. — Marvin Brown

I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing. — Anna Quindlen

FEARLESS is a vivid account of one man's journey from all-American boy to all-American hero. Blehm's writing takes you beyond the battlefield and right to the heart of the personal battles, sacrifices, and triumphs of one of America's elite warriors. Anyone looking for an inspiring story of inner strength and courage will be richly rewarded by this book. — Eric Greitens

Some of the most vivid writing in America is on the walls of restrooms. The men's room in the Albany, N.Y. railroad station, for instance, should be preserved as a national shrine: there is more wit there than in any Broadway hit! — Truman Capote

The Blood of Heroes is surely the best account to date, one that presents plenty of new insights while acting as a corrective-or at least an alternative viewpoint-to previous accounts ... Donovan combines that vital blend of authoritative scholarship with the vivid writing necessary to make an oft-told tale seem fresh. — William C. Davis

Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite. — Anthony Hecht

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened. — Annie Dillard

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. — Ellen Glasgow

A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. — H.P. Lovecraft

That is what's important. The life of the line. When I draw, it's like tied and untied writing. My lines can be vivid or dead. The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive. A line is in danger of dying all along.
My method of drawing is very much like jazz improvisation. I improvise with the lines and the colors. ( ... )
There's great joy in drawing. Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing. And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw. — Jean Cocteau

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did. — Ray Bradbury

Who is setting the bar for what you call accessibility? The definition of "accessible" is "easy to understand," and so much of the fiction I love is just ... not that. It is complex and rich and sometimes puzzling, and it stays with me precisely because I can't quite wrap my head around it. Sometimes it is lucid and approachable on the surface, and other times the language is congested in order to fire up strong sensations. Accessibility is such a strange, sad measure of the writing I love. Dora the Explorer is accessible. The Unconsoled is not. But I have never been deliberately difficult, if that's what you're getting at. That has no appeal to me. I've always tried to write the fiction that compels me the most - I have to feel passionate, engaged, and nearly desperate if I'm going to get anything done. When I'm working on material that is conceptual or abstract or in some way difficult, I strive for clarity, transparency, a vivid attack. — Ben Marcus

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

From where I sit, battles are hard. I've written my share. Sometimes I employ the private's viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That's vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general's point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction. — George R R Martin

Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. — William Hazlitt

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers] ... For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood. — Diane Ackerman

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote ... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic ... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did — John Fowles

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe. — Anthony Doerr

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless
a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. — William Faulkner

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish. — Charlotte Bronte

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga. — William Zinsser

Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer's use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader's malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination; such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience in the narrow circle of sedentary life. — Alexander Von Humboldt

A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating. — Bill Johnson

Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far
more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about her. But I
couldn't produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the
rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen.
Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to
start -the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.
Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of
writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the
memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to
understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her.
Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her
would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget
her, to remember that she had existed. — Haruki Murakami

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories. — John Irving

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light. — Janet Fitch

Writing is not about how well you can write the next "Great American Novel," using flawless grammar and snooty punctuation; sometimes, it's only about making someone smile, or laugh out loud. Sometimes, its sharing a fun thought, or putting a vivid life experience on paper so others' can share a great moment that had an impact on you, the author. — T. Hammond

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I'm not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ's so I'm constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there. — Carl Henegan

Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land. — William Zinsser

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days. — Dick Schaap

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live. — Rebecca Solnit

I have travel to the places I have been because, I had a vivid imagination of the places. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In England if something goes wrong
say, if one finds a skunk in the garden
he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift. — Alfred North Whitehead

'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand. — Melissa Bank

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany