Writer S Techniques Quotes & Sayings

He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he'd like to be somebody else. — Margaret Atwood

Stay with me to-night; you must see me die. I have long had the taste of death on my tongue, I smell death, and who will stand by my Constanze, if you do not stay? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

What's really hurting me, the name Islam is involved, and Muslim is involved and causing trouble and starting hate and violence ... Islam is not a killer religion ... Islam means peace, I couldn't just sit home and watch people label Muslims as the reason for this problem. — Muhammad Ali

The only way to improve a trick is to find a simpler and more direct way of doing it. — Paul LePaul

Alliteration seems to offend people. — Dean Koontz

I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people. — Michael Chabon

Knowledge is flour, but wisdom is bread. — Austin O'Malley

By perfecting this legislative machinery and by participating in the various international agreements we intend to contribute to the wholesome development of world trade. — Shigeru Yoshida

Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book. — Irving Stone

Here's a handy list of warning signs of the worst people on the road. Some are tuned-out menaces, others are just assholes. Be alert, and if you see this on a vehicle close to you, get away now. STICK FIGURE FAMILY: I hereby decree that you are allowed to accelerate to ramming speed every time you see a minivan with a silhouette of the family and their names on the rear window. We get it, you didn't pull out. Is that information you really think I'm interested in? I know you're a parent. You're driving a Plymouth Voyager with two hundred thousand miles on it; do you imagine I'm behind you thinking, "Who is that gay entrepreneur?" Even worse is the theme family. Oh, you're into snowboarding? Oh, you've got cats? Oh, they've all got Mickey ears, they must really love Disney. You know what I love? Driving more than fifty-three miles an hour. How about a stick figure depiction of your family moving the fuck over and letting me get to work on time? — Adam Carolla

You have to know how to read your lie and take a calculated risk when you hit out of the rough. — Ernie Els

Levinas's thought emphasizes not the primacy of the self, but the primacy of the other - that is, other human beings. He taught that the self comes into existence — Ira F. Stone

Lady Gaga not a diva, and she's not crazy. She's just an incredibly nice, down-to-earth person who really cares about art and creativity. It's pretty amazing to be able to work with her. I'm pretty grateful for that. — Evan Peters

In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. — Ursula K. Le Guin

As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:
genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story — Richard Yates

No political politicians on the board and stop sub-contracting anyway, which means getting out of Iraq. If anything needs to be policed, it needs to be done through a proper international body ... not through us sub-contracting teams of mercenaries. — Ken Loach

Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required. — Michel Faber

But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too. — Mo Yan

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story. — Lee Gutkind

I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned. — Robert Crais

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well. — Mark Forsyth

Is it about a bicycle? — Flann O'Brien

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I can't help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so I'm very excited when I notice that. — Kate Bernheimer

How can Vicky drive this crate?" Carson fumed. "It's arthritic, it's sclerotic, it's a dead car rolling. Doesn't she ever give it an oil change, is the thing lubed with sloth fat, what the hell? — Anonymous

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened. — Homer Hickam

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) — John Gardner

If we reconstructed human spirituality painstakingly, we would end up with a mangnificent tree whose branches go in so many directions, yet all trying to touch the heavens. — Henryk Skolimowski