Quotes about writing
These aren't necessarily the best or most instructive quotes about writing, or even the best I've read. In fact, I've not added any of the properly technical stuff. Just that at some point I bothered to copy and paste these quotes as something to bear in mind. About themes or structure or just the experience itself.
If you don't like it, I didn't make it for you. — T-Pain
Wrote about this quote a while ago: I didn't make it for you.
Two people pulling each other into Salvation is the only theme I find worthwhile. — EM Forster
I mean, same, mate.
The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time. — TS Eliot
Wizard of Oz as a formative influence.
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. [...] There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist. — Margaret Atwood
Variations on a theme.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear. — Joan Didion
Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling, but a song makes you feel a thought. — Yip Harburg, Wizard of Oz lyricist
I'm always tussling with the inefficiency of words. Versus other art forms.
the shape of all stories: the enduring pattern of how someone is found by being lost. All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. — John Yorke
Yorke's Into the Woods craft book is one of my favourites even if it is a bit too Tragedy. I like a five-act structure and I like this insistence on the midpoint and the symmetry.
You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. — Charles Bukowski
About the act of writing, creating.
Zest. Gusto. — Ray Bradbury
Everything in Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing could be a mad inspirational writing quote.