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In relation to a write, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them - W.H. Auden

There are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling; their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of emotion, a caprice of mind, an image or an intangible recollection.

Others are manifest whole, like an apple, and can be repeated infinitely without risk of altering their meaning.

Some are taken from reality and processed through inspiration, while others rise up from an instant of inspiration and become real after being told.

And then there are secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind; they are like living organisms, they grow roots and tentacles, they become covered with excrescences and parasites, and with time are transformed into the matter of nightmares. To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story.

-Isabelle Allend

An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of their own story better than anyone else.

- Unknown

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it

- Anais Nin

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarted, happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another

- Brenda Ueland

"The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things -- but above all we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad -- to be willing to risk everything to really express it all."

- John Cassavetes

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

-Ray Bradbury

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

-Charles Caleb Colton

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

-Philip K. Dick

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

-W. Somerset Maugham

"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."

-Enrique Jardiel Poncela

One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.

-Hunter S. Thompson

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I’m desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

-Harold Bloom

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

- Ray Bradbury

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

- Pearl S. Buck

"Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending. The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all - or having gotten there, you may not have said anything. This is probably not a good idea in public speaking, but it's an excellent idea in making art... Art happens between you and something - a subject, an idea, a technique - and both you and that something need to be free to move."

- 'Art and Fear' by David Bayles & Ted Orland

Art is never finished, only abandoned
-Leonardo De Vinci

"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what fiction is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….

- Phillip K. Dick

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
-Oscar Wilde

Finding new ideas is like prospecting for gold. If you look in the same old places, you'll find tapped out veins. But if you venture off the beaten path, you'll improve your chances of discovering new lodes. Remember: you can't see the good ideas behind you by looking twice as hard at what's in front of you.

-Roger von Oech

'Waiting for inspiration' is just a romantic way of describing procrastination.

-Stephen Minot

By making a note of something that strikes you, you separate it from the incessant stream of impressions that crowd across the mental eye, and perhaps fix it in your memory. All of us have had good ideas or vivid sensations that we thought would one day come in useful, but which, because we were too lazy to write them down, have entirely escaped us. When you know you are going to make a note of something, you look at it more attentively than you otherwise would, and in the process of doing so the words are borne in upon you that will give it its private place in reality. ...

- W. Somerset Maugham on writing

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

-Lillian Hellman

"I, on the other hand, am writing for myself alone, and declare once and for all that, even if I write as though I were addressing readers, I do it merely for form's sake, because it is easier for me to write like that. It's nothing but a device, an empty device. As for readers, I will never have any. I have already said so. . . .And also this: why, actually, do I want to write at all? If not for an audience, then couldn't I simply go over everything just in my mind, instead of putting it on paper? Right enough. Yet it will somehow be more solemn when put down on paper. There's something more impressive about it, there will be better judgment of myself, it will be in better style. Besides, I may in fact get some relief from writing it all down."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

I wrote a poem to the moon
But no one noticed it;
Although I hoped that late or soon
Someone would praise a bit
Its purity and grace forlone,
Its beauty tulip-cool...
But as my poem died still-born,
I felt a fool.

I wrote a verse of vulgar trend
Spiced with an oath or two;
I tacked a snapper at the end
And called it Dan McGrew.
I spouted it to bar-room boys,
Full fifty years away;
Yet still with rude and ribald noise
It lives today.

'Tis bitter truth, but there you are-
That's how a name is made;
Write of a rose, a lark, a star,
You'll never make the grade.
But write of gutter and of grime,
Of pimp and prostitute,
The multitude will read your rhyme,
And pay to boot.

So what's the use to burn and bleed
And strive for beauty's sake?
No one your poetry will read,
Your heart will only break.
But set your song in vulgar pitch,
If rhyme you will not rue,
And make your heroine a bitch...
Like Lady Lou.

-Robert William Service

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Oscar Wilde

If you're sitting at your computer every day telling yourself stories that make you laugh, make you cry, make you think -- then you're going to do the work that's truest to you. And that may not become critically acclaimed art, or it may not become commercially successful art, but it will by God be art, and it will be yours, and you will sleep better at night for doing it.

-Holly Lisle

You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

- Anne Lamott

Let it be your aim that, by reading your story, the melancholy may be moved to laughter and the cheerful made merrier still; let the simple not be bored, but may the clever admire your originality; let the grave ones not despise you, but let the prudent praise you. And keep in mind, above all, your purpose, which is that of undermining the ill-founded edifice that is constituted by those books of chivalry, so abhorred by many but admired by many more; if you succeed in attaining it, you will have accomplished no little.

-Miguel De Cervantes

The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly."
-JD Salinger, De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

Art is the only way to run away without actually leaving - Twla Tharp

Vermilion

Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket, and a sable brush.
Then, violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames,
he’d add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and, licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if,
at the ritual moment of departure,
I had to show you still belonged to me.
As if revision were
the purest form of love.

-Linda Paston