There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~Francis Bacon
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order. ~ Jean Luc Godard
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. ~ Ernest Hemingway, interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958
When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. ~ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~ Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947
Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~ Joseph Heller
Jack Kerouac’s “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:”
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven