Reads tagged with “writing”

Jane Austen’s Advice on Writing, in Letters to Her Teenage Niece
Epistles on the fine art of “speeding truth into the world.”

On “Beauty”: Marilynne Robinson on Writing, What Storytelling Can Learn from Science, and the Splendors of Uncertainty
“We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.”

The Art of Quickness: Italo Calvino on Digression as a Hedge Against Death and the Key to Great Writing
“Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search… for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.”

Voltaire on How to Write Well and Stay True to Your Creative Vision
“Beware, lest in attempting the grand, you overshoot the mark and fall into the grandiose.”

The Hand Through the Fence: Pablo Neruda on What a Childhood Encounter Taught Him About Writing and Why We Make Art
“To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know … widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”

Pearl S. Buck, the Youngest Woman to Receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on Art, Writing, and the Nature of Creativity
“The creative instinct is … an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual… — an energy which no single life can consume.”

The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing
“The books that give us the most pleasure, the deepest pleasure, combine uncertainty and satisfaction, tension and release.”

Ursula K. Le Guin on Where Ideas Come From, the “Secret” of Great Writing, and the Trap of Marketing Your Work
“All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.”

Form, Faith, and Freedom: Wendell Berry on What Poetry Teaches Us about the Secret to a Happy Marriage
“The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

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