There are indeed many ways in which filmgoing is like dreaming; but the likeness is always qualified. Films are like dreams in inv...olving one in a world whose course one cannot control, but unlike them in that their world does not incorporate the dream of effort and participation. Filmed reality shares with dreamed reality (as nothing else does) its tolerance of limitlessly inconsequent transitions and transformations; but it lacks that curious conceptual continuity of dreams in which what is a raven may become a writing desk or may simultaneously be a writing desk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing a book is like rearing children--willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle o...f the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with a cat-o'-nine tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficien...t, philanthropic self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a business as safe and commendable as ma...king soap or breakfast foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a d...esk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your... desk in midair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not ...hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, I know you haven't had much experience writing and none at all in pictures. But I've heard about you. It all sounded like yo...u're just the man I wanted for a story about the Navy. I don't want a story just about ships and planes. I want a story about the officers.... I want this story from a pen dipped in salt water not dry martinis. Do you know what I mean?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves fro...m any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great leading distinction between writing and speaking is, that more time is allowed for the one than the other, and hence dif...ferent faculties are required for, and different objects attained by each. He is properly the best speaker who can collect together the greatest number of apposite ideas at a moment's warning; he is properly the best writer who can give utterance to the greatest quantity of valuable knowledge in the course of his whole life. The chief requisite for the one, then, appears to be quickness and facility of perception--for the other, patience of soul and a power increasing with the difficulties it has to master. He cannot be denied to be an expert speaker, a lively companion, who is never at a loss for something to say on every occasion or subject that offers. He, by the same rule, will make a respectable writer who, by dint of study, can find out anything good to say upon any one point that has not yet been touched upon before, or who by asking for time, can give the most complete and comprehensive view of any question. The one must be done off-hand, at a single blow; the other can only be done by a repetition of blows, by having time to think and do better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »