Quotations

There are 80 posts filed in Quotations (this is page 4 of 8).

Write Up

“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right do I have to speak? Who will listen if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.” – Richard Rhodes

This quote was found at The Write Idea on Tumblr.

Hope in Unlikely Places

Butterfly Kiss of Hope

Never give up on hope, for hope waits to be born in unlikely places.
Hope is everywhere, you’ll find it in the flowers, in the air,
It’s delivered to you by butterflies wearing different faces,
When one softly brushes your cheek with a kiss, you’ll know it’s there.

J. Hinkle, Thoughtful Angels… and Friends.

Quotes from Robin McKinley

I’ve read Robin McKinley‘s book Sunshine, it was the one I liked best. I know I’ve read others but Sunshine sticks in my mind a lot more.

“Just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it’ll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.”

“it goes something like ‘There are a lot of ways to be yourself.”

“I like to assume that since I drive a car and maintain a respectable credit rating and rarely murder anyone and bury them in the back garden unless they really deserve it, that the fact that I hear voices won’t unduly disturb anyone.”

“The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them ‘magic’ or ‘dragons’ or ‘faeries’ and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I’m prejudiced.”

“The story is always better than your ability to write it.”

“One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer… is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you’re going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you’ve turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you’re never going to write well enough. Of course that’s what keeps you trying — trying as hard as you can — which is a good thing.”

“I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don’t want to be a writer unless you have no choice – and if you have no choice, good luck to you.”

“When you write your first novel you don’t really know what you’re doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first ‘Once upon a time’. I’m not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.”

“I’m also old… and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I’m not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I’ve also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and I’m getting even more three dimensionally biased as I get older — gardening, bell ringing… piano playing… And the stories I seem to need to write seem to need that kind of nourishment from me — how you feed your story telling varies from writer to writer. My story-telling faculty needs real-world fresh air and experiences that create calluses (and sometimes bruises).”

“What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.”

“My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl ‘Write me! Write me now!’ But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying ‘Wait for me! Wait for me!’ and waving my notebook in the air.”

Great Science Fiction Quotations

Peter Grant has a page of Great Science Fiction Quotes in his blog. I can’t pick just one as a favourite. Here are some:

“There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality… It’s a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can’t think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.” – Arthur C Clarke

“Isn’t it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?”

“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” – Isaac Asimov

“Experience comes from doing, not from being told. Experiment and discover. Seek and find. It is not machinations of others that compel us to do so; it is our need to know. It is, in the end, the way we learn.” – Terry Brooks, The Talismans of Shannara

“A neat and orderly living space is the sign of a dangerously sick mind.” – Mercedes Lackey, The Black Gryphon

“Reality is the part that refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.” – Phillip K. Dick

I found a few others in my own searching:

“For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects”. – Gene Roddenberry

“Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible.” – Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone

“The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I’m not sure it’ll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.” – “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956)

Alone… At Last!

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. – Barbara Kingsolver

I find it hard to really focus on writing something and then be interrupted and go back to it. It is especially aggravating to be interrupted over and over and over again. I like this quote cause I just love the idea of being alone when I write. It doesn’t happen very often.

Writing Without Talking

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted. – Jules Renard

Feel you never get the last word, never get to finish a sentence. Write instead. You can carry on a conversation as long as you choose. There may be interruptions to the writing itself, but you can continue on adding to the conversation with the written word later.