R. Garcia's Website
  • Home
  • Documents
    • Fiction
    • Poetry and Poetry-Related
    • Humor
    • Essays
    • Photographs
  • Blog: The Eclectic Life
  • Quotes
  • Books
    • The Sun Zebra
  • : ^ )
    • Fun Quotes
    • Rolando's Official Web Mascot
    • Cool Videos
    • The Power of Words
    • Odd and Fantastic Pictures
  • Contact

Isaac Asimov on Cutting Without Mercy

1/19/2015

0 Comments

 
What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.
0 Comments

Richard Brinsley Sheridan on Stealing

1/19/2015

0 Comments

 
Steal! And egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children, disfigure them and make ‘em pass for their own.
0 Comments

Kurt Vonnegut on the Power of Writers

1/19/2015

0 Comments

 
Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
0 Comments

Anton Chekhov on the Need to Be Cold

10/16/2013

0 Comments

 
When you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder—it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.
0 Comments

James Kilpatrick on Using Familiar Words

10/16/2013

3 Comments

 
“The first law of writing,” said Macaulay, “that law to which all others are subordinate, is this: that the words employed shall be such as to convey to the reader the meaning of the writer.” Toward that end, use familiar words—words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.
3 Comments

Ernest Hemingway on Hurting Like Hell

10/16/2013

0 Comments

 
For Christ sake write and don't worry what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket . . . . Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

0 Comments

Rosellen Brown on approaching writing as a job

2/9/2013

0 Comments

 
It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.
0 Comments

Gustave Flaubert on doubting yourself

2/9/2013

0 Comments

 
Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph.
0 Comments

John Berryman on cultivating extreme indifference to praise and blame

2/9/2013

0 Comments

 
I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.
0 Comments

Advice for writers by Bruce Feirstein

1/5/2013

0 Comments

 
Move to New York City. Get married. Buy an incredibly expensive apartment. Have children, a dog, a second home in the country. Lease an imported luxury automobile. Come the first of the month, I promise, you will have no problem writing.

0 Comments
<<Previous
    I am a trader of jacks and a jack of all trades!
    Do you like this blog? You can have links to blog posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.
    Picture
    Follow Phantomimic on Twitter

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Advice For Writers
    Arrogance
    Best Sellers
    Books
    Buying A House
    Capacity To Astonish
    Cats
    Censorship
    Children
    Courage
    Creativity
    Fear Of Writing
    Fiction
    First Draft
    Getting Better At Writing
    Novels
    Nude
    On Writing
    Painting
    Panic
    Plagiarism
    Poetry
    Pornography
    Public
    Publishers
    Readers
    Reader's Rights
    Rejection
    Rewriting
    Self Publishing
    Self-Publishing
    Success & Failure
    Sun Zebra
    The Word
    Trouble
    Vanity
    Vocabulary
    Words
    Writer
    Writers
    Writers Drinking
    Writer's Enemies
    Writers Spying
    Writing
    Writing Days
    Writing Ideas

    Archives

    January 2015
    October 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.