The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: art, writing

There’s nothing more difficult than a line.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Say it new or say it straight.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

We live today amid ritualized anithumanisms. Among those intelligent enough to feel despair, some seek salvation in the literary artist. Artists love flattery; and the scam doesn’t work without mystifying the process.The weather is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious.Wall Street is unpredictable, but it is not mysterious. Writing is unpredictable, (like street and sky, there are too many variables.) Its mystery vanishes, like a shadow, the moment the light aimed at your characters turns back upon yourself.

The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.

The material’s out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Christy Leigh Stewart

A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it’s just more pretentious.

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.