Reads tagged with “writing”

Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

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May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”

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Maya Angelou on Writing and Our Responsibility to Our Creative Gifts

“I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.”

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Virginia Woolf on the Courage to Create Rather Than Cater and the Remedy for Self-Doubt

“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.”

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Rebecca Solnit on Writing, Gardening, and the Life of the Mind

“As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state.”

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Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work

“There is no greatness without a little stubbornness… Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.”

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May Sarton on How to Cultivate Your Talent

“A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used.”

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Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’”

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Nick Cave on Songwriting, the Mystery of the Unconscious, and the Sweet Severity of Truth

“Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.”

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Barry Lopez on Storytelling and His Advice on the Three Steps to Becoming a Writer

“It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”

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Reads tagged with “writing”

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”

“I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.”

“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.”

“As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state.”

“There is no greatness without a little stubbornness… Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.”

“A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used.”

“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’”

“Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.”

“It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”

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