Writing Quotes

Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand…

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of the poetry is the way in. My poems often begin with a rhythm but without the words. A few words may come to you, and they may be …

We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to…

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water….

“Every morning when you get up, write an epitaph!” I watched them scribble something. “That’s good, I encouraged them, “start right away!,” though I knew that what they were scribbling were not epitaphs, but “every morning when you get up write an epi… epipi… epi…”

The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past, but with a difference.

Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired. There is, in other words, nothing new about it. To be…

Even when they were brought over to this world through Izzy’s art, they lived in secret, in their own hidden world. Izzy could find them – or they found her. I could see them, because I knew where to look. I suppose other people…

They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary. They suggest, and let their viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren’t afraid…

Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears… There is a difference between writing for children and for adults. I am lucky, though, as I seldom seem to have my audience in mind…

If I had to name the QuoteSnack muses, they’d be Curiosity and her cousin Stubborn. I Know I am going to look until I find, even when I don’t feel like it. I have faith that this discipline is good for me, and I believe I…

I hear I am one of the most successful living poets in the world these days. And if someone asked me, “How in the hell did that ever happen?” I could respond, “Well, I worked my butt off, and I have been lucky at poker, and…”

“I just know it’s what I want to do,” she said, “but…”

Her voice trailed off, and for a time they walked in silence. The tang of the sea was in the air. The Otherworld stars wheeled and spun in constellations unfamiliar to Cat’s…