#writing quotation

[csholden]

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up. —Charles Dickens

[stardustmachine]

Not all stories need to be understood; some just need to be felt.

G. V. Sabella

[312inspirationlane-blog]

Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives. What I wonder is whether any of this sympathy for fictional characters translates into greater sympathy for people in life. What do you think? Looking back on novels and stories you've loved, do you think they affected how you see people?

-Tom Rachman, author of The Imperfectionists

[312inspirationlane-blog]

Scholarly prose, like imaginative literature, is inevitably personal. Combined with social, political, and individual beliefs and commitments, personal desire determines intellectual curiosity and discursive style. Even the topics scholars select to write about are displaced ways of writing about the self.

Claudia Tate, in the MLA Forum "The Inevitability of the Personal"

[312inspirationlane-blog]

One thing you learn as a writer is that some of your best lines are the ones you delete. That doesn’t always work in social media.

Dan Wetzel, Yahoo Sports