Quotes, Advice from your fav writers & articles

Hey I love reading my favorite writer's take on poetry especially if it sounds poetic.  I thought this could be a sweet thread to post up lines, or tid bits on writing, wisdom on writing, or articles you read you thought were interesting. I have A LOT of them I've only recently been starting to share.  

Here are some I love:  

“When you write in prose, you cook the rice. When you write poetry, you turn rice into rice wine. Cooked rice doesn’t change its shape, but rice wine changes both in quality and shape. Cooked rice makes one full so one can live out one’s life span … wine, on the other hand, makes one drunk, makes the sad happy, and the happy sad. Its effect is sublimely beyond explanation.”
—        Wu Qiao


“I dont write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut. My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.”
—       
Anna Kamienska,

“…Intelligence is often the enemy of poetry, because it limits too much, and it elevates the poet to a sharp-edged throne where he forgets that ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head…”  _ Federico Garcia Lorca

"Authors with a mortgage never get writer’s block.”
Mavis Cheek


This is my absolute Favorite:  "The word, the word, above all is truly magical.  Not only for its meaning, but for its artful manipulation."_Anna Deveare Smith

A link on making writing better:  http://voices.yahoo.com/5-tips-writing-better-poetry-jumpstart-504563.html

" A POEM BEGINS WITH A LUMP IN THE THROAT. "
by Robert Frost

"The first draft of anything is usually shit." _Ernest Hemigway


Here's a video i love;  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zG_SBw_mM18

This is a collected wisdom from famous writers:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/03/advice-on-writing/

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." - William Wordsworth

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation." - James Fenton

Elliott Smith: “You can take a picture of New York and one person looking at it will think it looks really depressing, frightening; and someone else will look at it and think of all the fun things you can do in New York. I think songs are kinda like that.”

About music, but I think it applies just as well to poetry.

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” - Stephen King


"Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are the most important to you." - Zadie Smith


"Substitute 'damn' every time you are inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." - Mark Twain


"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"My grandma and even my sister have asked me, after they read my stuff, ‘Why don’t you write about happy things?’ My usual response is, ‘Well, I’m not happy.’"

_m_L_ said:"My grandma and even my sister have asked me, after they read my stuff, ‘Why don’t you write about happy things?’ My usual response is, ‘Well, I’m not happy.’"

Are you quoting yourself?

You are, aren't you?

“I'd go off alone,
because you can't trust those who want to break the rules and you certainly can't trust those who make the rules so you do the only thing possible,
you avoid the rules.”

― Steven Herrick

"Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink"
          Charles Bukowski

Atakti said:[quote-227008-_m_L_]"My grandma and even my sister have asked me, after they read my stuff, ‘Why don’t you write about happy things?’ My usual response is, ‘Well, I’m not happy.’"

Are you quoting yourself?

You are, aren't you?[/quote]

Um, NO! Don't ridiculous!..............okay I was, just as a troll though.

Really I don't have a favorite quote. What I do is I take inspiration from the fact that most of  my favorite writers never gave up their dream and succeeded.

"Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to." - Sylvia Plath

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"  - Emily Dickinson

"Writers dig a hole then try and fill the dirt in from the bottom." ~Bernie Newton

"writers fuck a sheep then pretend they fucked a fairy buried inside of some flower no one's ever really seen." ~ Steven Spielberg

TryHarderMartyr said:"writers fuck a sheep then pretend they fucked a fairy buried inside of some flower no one's ever really seen." ~ Steven Spielberg
Really? I like this instead.

I dream for a living.- Steven Spielberg

Murder your darlings.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his essay, 'On the Art of Writing' (1916) gave his readers the advice: 'Murder your darlings'. By this he meant that as a writer you should be prepared to cross out or reject anything you've written, even if it's a word, a phrase or a sentence you're really proud of, if it doesn't fit in with the rest of the work when you read through the piece afterwards.