"No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered."

Writing, Rituals

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"No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered."

Exlpore more Writing quotes

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."

John Steinbeck, American Author

Writing, Loneliness, Communication, Story

"Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, Tools, Writer

"If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day."

Philip Pullman, British Writer

Writing, Day, Luck

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, Plagiarism

"In the summer of '80, Silhouette bought my first book."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, First, Summer

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

Toni Morrison, American Novelist

Writing, World

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Writing, Word, Power, Expression

"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

Writing, Ego, Criticism, Success

"In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them."

W. H. Auden, English Poet

Writing, May, Writer

"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."

Stephen King, American Author

Writing, Truth, Wisdom, Power, Regret

Explore more quotes by Stephen Greenblatt

"The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind."

Literature

"I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough."

Thought

"I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!"

Life

"First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so."

Literature

"But I never listen to music while I'm writing."

Music

"What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place."

Writing

"I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me."

Work

"I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about."

Love

"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter."

Nothing

"Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life."

Life