Wise Words about Writing
Edward Albee
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
Sandra Alcosser
Poetry calls into question what it means to be human.
Elizabeth Alexander
You have to tell your own story simultaneously as you hear and respond to the stories of others.
Margaret Walker Alexander
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Meena Alexander
The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history… In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist… Poetry’s task is to reconcile us to the world—not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives.
Sherman Alexie
Poetry = Anger x Imagination
Isabel Allende
Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
Write what should not be forgotten.
Steve Almond
To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.
Maya Angelou
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’
Aristophanes
By words the mind is winged.
Aristotle
Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.
Margaret Atwood
A word after a word after a word is power.
If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.
Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
Writing poetry is a state of free float.
W.H. Auden
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.
Gaston Bachelard
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Edward Gorey
If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.
Seamus Heaney
If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.
Anaïs Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
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