Quotable Quotes discussion
For the writers out there
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Brad
(last edited Aug 25, 2016 12:56PM)
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Oct 04, 2007 12:37PM
"Being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life." - Lawrence Kasdan
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Brad, that quote is so true!My older daughter is my very best reader and adviser on my work-in-progress. She sent me the quote below as a gentle reminder not to rush.
From ENDURING LOVE by Ian McEwan:
"The best description of a reality does not need to mimic it's velocity. Whole books, whole research departments, are dedicated to
the first half-minute in the history of the universe. Vertiginous theories of chaos and turbulence are predicted upon the supremacy of
initial conditions, which need painstaking description."
It's funny, I was think about something similar to this on my drive to work this morning. I was wondering what the longest treatment of a small amount of time has been in literature. I'm just about finished with The Sportswriter which takes place over three days and is 375 pages. Ulysses has that beat with a single day and being looong.
"mimic its velocity" is a nice phrase.
Ian McEwan's novel SATURDAY is not as long as ULYSSES, but it too covers a single day--in rich detail, moving on or lingering as the story requires.Here's a quote from another of my favorite writers, Barry Unsworth, from SUGAR AND RUM:
"All literature begins with the pressure of a secret, some unique perception that needs urgently to be expressed."
HA! That one made me laugh out loud. I'm a journalist and man, the more I talk to people about what I do for a living, the more I realize that I totally messed up on career day ;p
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." -Red Smith "A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all." - Rita Mae Brown
"I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.' I’d like to show how 'intimations of morality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.'"--Middlesex
"It’s impossible to do justice to the smell in words. One may try to quicken the olfactory imagination with poetic evocations like 'suppurating abscess…colonic effluvia…smegma.'"
--Et Tu, Babe
"What actually was spoken, while moving enough to those involved at the actual time, flattens like toothpaste when transferred to paper for later reading: 'my dove,' 'my only,' 'bliss, bliss,' et cetera."
--The Princess Bride
"Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick."
--Don't Get Too Comfortable
it seems that humanity and its enlightement are the miracles that made eternity.but they did not exist like the way they should,who could say something about them in the future?"bertolt brecht"
somebody wrote on the wall they want war,but some one who wrote this now he is dead in the war too!"bertolt brecht"
"A THING OF BEAUTY IS JOY FOREVER"(JHON KEADS)
