I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows, so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing. I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it. Maxine Hong Kingston
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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Gustave Flaubert
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
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Chuck Palahniuk
In order to write about life first you must live it.
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Ernest Hemingway
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can...
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Stephen Fry
More Quotes By Maxine Hong Kingston
In a time of destruction, create something.
This is the most important thing about me-- I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I...
It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips — biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)
The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.
Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don’t sleep like eyes. Those who live by the sea examine the driftwood and glass balls that float from foreign ships. They let scores of invisible imps loose...
