Quotes & Sayings About Writing The Future

The future is completely open and we are writing it moment to moment. — Pema Chodron

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things ... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.
[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938] — Mikhail Bulgakov

The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do. — Thomas Metzinger

We cannot turn back the clock and relive cherished pastimes. We move beyond our origins. A person must make their way in an evolving social, political, and economic world order. We must not be too quick writing off the influence of our prior experiences, because the long tentacles the past remain vibrant strands within us. While the past does not cast our future in stone, its durable mold shapes our present. The ingrained strumming of our personal histories, sentimental or otherwise, also portents what might come along in our future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

If I'd learned anything from writing this book, it was that no matter how you might read characters in a book, real life was always different. It was easy for a writer to spin a story to make the hero or heroine seem smart and intelligent, for them to make the right moves, take the correct steps toward their future, but when it came to real life, it didn't quite happen that easily. People were constantly making mistakes and showing insecurities, even when they didn't realize it, and being so imperfect that it actually made them perfect . . . because they were human. Those — Meghan Quinn

This is the Manifesto of Little Monster
There is something heroic about the way my fans operate their cameras. So precisely, so intricately and so proudly. Like Kings writing the history of their people, is their prolific nature that both creates and procures what will later be percieved as the kingdom. So the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the Kings. They are the Queens. They write the hisory of the kingdom and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we percieve ourselves to be or rather to become, in the future.
When you are lonely,
I will be lonely too.
And this is the fame. — Lady Gaga

Everywhere I go, I meet people ready for change. People who are fed up with the exhaustion that comes from devoting one's life to the work-watch-spend treadmill. People who know in their hearts that it's wrong to treat the planet and whole groups of people as disposable. People who are challenging the bogus stories we've been fed for years and are writing their own about hope and love and working together to build a better future for everyone. — Annie Leonard

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden. — Gene Wolfe

Bruce is still my friend. We don't talk much. We don't have to. He is great and in his own league. I'm not him and he is not me. But we are on similar paths, writing and singing out own kind of songs around the world, along with Bob and a few other singer/songwriters. It is a a silent fraternity of sorts, occupying this space in people's souls with our music. Last year, I lost my right-hand man, the pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. This year Bruce lost his right-hand man, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. It's time for another talk; friends can help each other just by being there. Now both of us will look to our right and see a giant hole, a memory, the past and the future. I won't play with another steel player trying to recreate Ben's parts, and I know Bruce won't play with another sax man trying to play Clarence's. Those parts are not going to happen again. They already did. That takes a lot out of our repertoires. — Neil Young

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. — Roland Barthes

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. — Ronald Carter

Let's say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your advertising isn't working and sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family's future depends on it, other people's families depend on it. Now, what do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up? — Rosser Reeves

Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness. — Pema Chodron

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person's own precursors: it revises a person's conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the "now," and alters the course and outcome person's future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person's thoughts, debunk a person's delusion, and analyze a person's values. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom. — David Mamet

It's been suggested that most women fail to write significantly because the female mind is viscerotonic, and occupied almost exclusively with the moment-to-moment reality of emotions. If this is true, literature's loss is science fiction's gain, for Out of Bounds, Judith Merril's collection of short stories, is a warm and colorful rendering of the minutiae of the future. — Alfred Bester

Intellectuals love Jefferson and hate markets, and intellectuals write most of the books. Intellectuals often think that they should, for the benefit of mankind, act as fiduciaries for the clods who don't have to be intellectuals, and I suspect that has to do with [why historians love Jefferson and not Hamilton, even though Hamilton's vision of America's commercial future was vastly more accurate than Jefferson's]. — John Steele Gordon

I am interested in my music lasting only while I'm alive. I'm not writing for the future. — Sonny Rollins

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work. — Augusten Burroughs

I try not to repeat myself. It's the hardest thing in the world to do-there are only so many notes one human being can master ... One of the reasons we're going out on the road and why we're titling this tour as "Musicology" is because we want to bring that back. We want to teach the kids and musicians of the future the art of song writing, the art of real musicianship. — Prince

Apart from writing books, my 40s have been about pursuing personal growth. Whatever were the mistakes of my earlier life, I've been committed to a pause, a regroup. I don't want to make the same mistakes in the future. — Monique Roffey

In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world. — Aysha Taryam

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us. — Joyce Carol Oates

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense. — Kelli Russell Agodon

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have. — James Salter

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age. — Alexei Maxim Russell

Sylvia quotes Dick as telling her: "I am afraid the demands of wifehood and motherhood would preoccupy you too much to allow you to do the painting and writing you want." Dick was sharp enough to understand that the bright flame that drew him to Sylvia disqualified her from his future. He would not allow Sylvia- or any woman- to outshine him. — Elizabeth Winder

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. — John Fowles

Sandeep Jauhar's Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem - so movingly told - that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I do believe that in the future, not by dismantling what we have here - I helped write that bill - but by moving forward, rallying the American people, I do believe we should have health care for all. — Bernie Sanders

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it! — Ken Thompson

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides. — Walter Kirn

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past. — Mary McCarthy

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. — William Gibson

As I go off into the big black abyss of my future, I have to admit that I am terrified and also a bit insecure in my decisions. But, I also realize that anyone who has ever gone off into uncharted waters must have felt similar to the way I feel now, which gives me a small ounce of comfort. I don't know how to do what I am doing, I have no way of knowing if this is the right way or not. But I guess I'll never know until I get there. So, this is me, being a pioneer. — Leigh Hershkovich

Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art. — Anais Nin

If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher. — Clifford Stoll

Think for a moment about the process that humans have used to record events throughout history. The first evidence we know of is paintings on cave walls. A little further along in time, after many intermediate steps, we see the development of writing. In the more recent past, we see the invention of the camera, audio recording devices, and ultimately video. The manner in which humans have recorded history (and to a lesser extent our own lives) has evolved. We've come a long way. Consider the implications of time. Much of the technology we take for granted today was pure science fiction 50-100 years ago, a dream 200 years ago, and inconceivable 500 years ago. Using these groupings of viewpoints, we can project into the future and categorize the possibilities. In — Todd William

Today's events are tomorrow's history, yet events seen by the naked eye lack the depth and breadth of human struggles, triumphs and suffering. Writing history is writing the soul of the past ... so that the present generation may learn from past mistakes, be inspired by their ancestor's sacrifices, and take responsibility for the future. — Epifanio De Los Santos

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. — Jacob Bronowski

I did not act in this fashion deliberately; I did not prefer this kind of relationship with people. I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared, in which common memory formed a common past, in which collective hope reflected a national future. But I knew that no such thing was possible in my environment. The only ways in which I felt that my feelings could go outward without fear of rude rebuff or searing reprisal was in writing or reading, and to me they were ways of living. — Richard Wright

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.
(So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ... ) — Doris Lessing

There exist concretely alarm clocks, signboards, tax forms, policemen, so many guard rails against anguish. But as soon as the enterprise is held at a distance from me, as soon as I am referred to myself because I must await myself in the future, then I discover myself suddenly as the one who gives its meaning to the alarm clock, the one who by a signboard forbids himself to walk on a flower bed or on the lawn, the one from whom the boss's order borrows its urgency, the one who decides the interest of the book which he is writing, the one who finally makes the values exist in order to determine his action by their demands. I emerge alone and in anguish confronting the unique and original project which constitutes my being; all the barriers, all the guard rails collapse, nihilated by the consciousness of my freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We are writing the future in Letters of Fire. — Neil Gaiman

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow. — John Fowles

I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future. — Ian Rankin

I spent years in a graduate literature program learning what makes great writing, and the only conclusion we came to was that the future of graduate literature programs was safe because nobody is ever going to agree on what makes great writing. — Brandon Sanderson

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building? — Sara Sheridan

We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that 'except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it' I firmly believe this; by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a by word down to future ages. — Benjamin Franklin

One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king. — Sam Kean

If man could write his own fate, he would have designed his journey to be without obstacles. Yet all obstacles come with valuable lessons designed just for you and only you. Suffering is imposed on us time and again so that one day we would become brave wise masters. That is, a strong being who is confidently aware of their intended direction in life, and fearlessly adding value to the world and their future. — Suzy Kassem

Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect. — Freeman Dyson

I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely think it's about the money. It's a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor. — Marina Keegan

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. — Tom Stoppard

The heart is a repository of emotions
real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future
and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell. — A.A. Patawaran

How are you? How was your flight? He hit the Send button without recognizing that in writing to her he was taking a step back from his life as he knew it and into the unknown future, for one cannot embark upon the new without giving up something in return. — Jill Bialosky

It always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned. Talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless. — Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

I recently found myself going through a period of uncertainty about my future as a performer, my status as a personality, the believability of my Christian witness and the knowledge of God's will in my life. I felt a force bigger than myself saying, 'Lay back. Take it easy. Study hard. Read your bible. Think, write and keep your mouth shut for awhile.' — Johnny Cash

If a 25-year old can't read and write and he or she isn't gaining marketable skills, it doesn't matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House. His or her future will be bleak. — J. C. Watts

If you are willing to take the trip through 'Analogue,' you'll be rewarded with some of the best writing in gaming today and a look into the future of what kind of meaningful stories video games are capable of telling. — Rob Manuel

The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future. — Abigail Scott Duniway

Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'. — Paul Auster

When you write a show, you just never know if it will have a future or if the show will end up ever having a production, but, that doesn't mean that the songs - the best of the best songs - can't be pulled out and put on a CD. And, if the shows that they come from end up happening, then people will regard this as like a quirky little concept recording. And, if the shows don't end up happening, at least the songs will live on in some capacity. — Michael Patrick Walker

In TIME June 7, 2010
On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:
"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers ... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10 — Garrison Keillor

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. — Sylvia Plath

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.
Happy Eighth birthday, blog. — Neil Gaiman

I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet. — L.M. Fields

Women must find their own answer. That's the important thing. I'm no longer interested in books about women written by men. Even if I could believe in their objectivity, I just can't find their opinions relevant. Now I will only believe what a woman has to say about women, because even if it's not entirely true, it's her struggle and she's on the way to the answer.
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress. I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body. — Marguerite Duras

When ambition enters, creativity disappears - because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future - and a creative person is always in the present. — Rajneesh

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting. — Grant Morrison

Step by step, you make your way forward. That's why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful. You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work. Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day. One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future. — Gretchen Rubin

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows. — Niall Williams

The point of the resurrection ... is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die ... What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it ... What you do in the present - by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself - will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it ... ). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom. — N. T. Wright

The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or expressing yourself in some way. These are the happiest moments of your life - when the real you comes out, when you don't care about the past and you don't worry about the future. You are childlike. — Miguel Ruiz

History is the roadmap to a better tomorrow. Destroying it is getting rid of any chance of what not to do for future generations. — Jason E. Hodges

The smartest thing I did in law school: asking my future wife to go out dancing with me. The smartest thing I did when practicing law: quitting. The smartest thing I've done in writing: following my own head and writing what I wanted to write, and nothing but. — Ben Fountain

Writing ... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you ... You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. — Natalie Goldberg

What exactly is the new verse movement? The New Verse Movement of the 1910's was to make poetry relevant again by immersing it into the spaces, technologies, and social dynamics of the modern city.
And Now In The Present And Future ?
The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century follows these same beliefs. To somehow ignite the spark and to help make poetry relevant again in a new age of technologies (The Internet) and to support new & experimental as well as older poetic forms. The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century is all about change and free expression of the creative mind. — R.M. Engelhardt

I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone — G.K. Chesterton

Speaking and writing English perfectly should not be a privilege. To those who try to politicize this matter, I tell them now, do not mess with the future of our children. — Luis Fortuno

You're the creator of your own future. Get to writing. — Ashley Brooke Robbins

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future. — Bret Easton Ellis

And if you are waiting for a new book in a long ongoing series, whether from George or from Pat Rothfuss or from someone else ...
Wait. Read the original book again. Read something else. Get on with your life. Hope that the author is writing the book you want to read, and not dying, or something equally as dramatic. And if he paints the house, that's fine.
And ( ... ) in the future, when you see other people complaining that George R.R. Martin has been spotted doing something other than writing the book they are waiting for, explain to them, more politely than I did the first time, the simple and unanswerable truth: George R. R. Martin is not working for you. — Neil Gaiman

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present. — Pamela Sargent

She was making the case that we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile. I had just begun trying to make the case for hope in writing, and I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most. — Rebecca Solnit

We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard's sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Write down your barrier thoughts, and then consider ways to reinterpret the situation. In the process, ask yourself questions like ... What else could this situation or experience mean? Can anything good come from it? Does it present any opportunities for me? What lessons can I learn and apply to the future? Did I develop any strengths as a result? — Sonja Lyubomirsky

My touring isn't about collecting souvenirs and always being on the go. My souvenirs are writing in my journal and creating new music, because that fits easily into my backpack when I'm travelling around the world. It's something that I can share later with fans or with future family members. — Jason Mraz

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer. — Gerard De Marigny

The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page. — Italo Calvino

Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future. — Steve Ballmer

Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears' stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors' saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the sacrosanct obligation of telling their kith and kin the memorable story of the scenic days they spent as children of nature splashing about in their naked innocence in the brook of infinite time and space. We must scrupulous document our family's history as well as scrawl out our personal story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share - a vantage on the past - that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence. — Jill Lepore

I ended up at fifty, over-the-hill, thinking I had no future. Finally, I realized that I had allowed myself to write less than I could ... As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we're good, we'll always be in trouble. Let's be sure we deserve it. — Waldo Salt

If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you'd probably never get out of bed. — Pankaj Mishra

You can't undo the past, but you can remedy it by creating a better future. — A.D. Posey

You were too young back then to understand how much you would later forget - and too locked in the present to realize that the person you were writing to was in fact your future self. So you put down the journal, and little by little, over the course of the next forty-seven years, almost everything was lost. — Paul Auster