{"quotes":[{"text":"Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.","author":"Kilroy J. Oldster","tags":["beautiful-life","beauty-of-life","beauty-of-nature","beauty-of-the-world","death","death-and-dying","essay-writing","essayist","memories","memories","memory","writers","writers-on-writing","writers","writing","writing-philosophy"],"id":281,"author_id":"Kilroy+J.+Oldster"},{"text":"It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.","author":"Flannery O'Connor","tags":["writers-on-writing"],"id":474,"author_id":"Flannery+O%27Connor"},{"text":"Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.","author":"C. JoyBell C.","tags":["art","artists","music","painting","prayer","sculpting","writers-on-writing","writing"],"id":789,"author_id":"C.+JoyBell+C."},{"text":"A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["always","chronic","inveterate","literature","literature","lover","natural","nature","nature-lover","poet","poetry","poets","should","ten-words","writers","writers-on-writing"],"id":848,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"As so often happens in my strange writing process, after weeks of distraction; of not thinking about the book at all; yesterday I started writing before the sun was up, or coffee was made. Whipped out a whole chapter of probably six or seven separate scenes in less than two hours. Now today, the whole story has slipped into a deeper level of knowing and connections than has (as far as I know, anyway) ever really been written about before. This is much as my experience was with Ailana, when I kept slipping into deeper and deeper gears. Bringing forth insights I myself had never learned or suspected.","author":"Edward Fahey","tags":["writers","writers-on-writing","writers-on-writing-books","writing"],"id":987,"author_id":"Edward+Fahey"},{"text":"People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.","author":"Sara Levine","tags":["writers","writers-on-writing","writing"],"id":1021,"author_id":"Sara+Levine"},{"text":"A writer of any merit does not worry about being accepted everywhere. He must write to inspire, to change for the better or to challenge the status quo!","author":"Avijeet Das","tags":["inspirational-life","life-lessons","life","philosophy-of-life","why-i-write","writer","writer","writers-inspiration","writers-on-writing"],"id":1570,"author_id":"Avijeet+Das"},{"text":"Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.","author":"M.V. Carey","tags":["writers-on-writing","writing","writing-process"],"id":1763,"author_id":"M.V.+Carey"},{"text":"I don’t know’,” he said. “Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage.” And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer. I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author’s craftsmanship.","author":"John William Tuohy","tags":["book-snob","foster-care","vonnegut","writers-on-writing"],"id":2436,"author_id":"John+William+Tuohy"},{"text":"The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.","author":"Aleksandar Hemon","tags":["balkan","balkans","writers","writers-on-writing","writers","writing-life"],"id":2441,"author_id":"Aleksandar+Hemon"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":740,"pages":74,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}