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tea-and-liminality:

This is for all the unsung fic writers; the ones who don’t make the must-read lists, the ones who don’t get recced, the ones who don’t get hundreds of kudos, the rarepair writers out on the peripheries of fandom, the ones who toil away quietly for the handful of people who read and love them. You matter – you’re a writer too, and don’t you ever forget it. 🙂

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Here’s the thing about being a writer, or a musician, or an artist, or any sort of creative person. The ones who make it are the ones who make themselves do it. They’re the ones who practice even when it seems like they aren’t getting any better. They’re the ones who open up their work-in-progress when their friends are going out hey-are-you-coming-with-us — even if they know that this novel is not the one that will be good enough to get published, because they know that practice is the only way to get to the one that will be good enough to be published. They’re the ones who send out query letters and hear no and they send out more query letters and they hear no again and they send out query letters and they hear no again. They’re the ones that hear no as not yet and nothing is ever a failure, it’s only a complicating plot point in the arc of their life. They’re the ones who realize that there’s no point tricking your way into publication, because the point is to write something other people fall in love with; that’s what being a successful storyteller is. They’re the ones who are hungry for it. No, they’re the ones who are starving for it.

They’re a little unhinged.

Everyone else is everyone else.

Maggie Stiefvater (via annabethisterrified)
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The Last Words Of 25 Famous Dead Writers

ellejello:

matt-the-blind-cinnamon-roll:

powerhousearena:

When you’ve dedicated your life to words, it’s important to go out eloquently.

  1. Ernest Hemingway: “Goodnight my kitten.” Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.
  2. Jane Austen: “I want nothing but death.” In response to her sister, Cassandra, who was asking her if she wanted anything.
  3. J.M Barrie: “I can’t sleep.”
  4. L. Frank Baum: “Now I can cross the shifting sands.”
  5. Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul.”
  6. Thomas Hobbes: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap into the dark,”
  7. Alfred Jarry: “I am dying…please, bring me a toothpick.”
  8. Hunter S. Thompson: “Relax — this won’t hurt.”
  9. Henrik Ibsen: “On the contrary!”
  10. Anton Chekhov: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.”
  11. Mark Twain: “Good bye. If we meet—” Spoken to his daughter Clara.
  12. Louisa May Alcott: “Is it not meningitis?” Alcott did not have meningitis, though she believed it to be so. She died from mercury poison.
  13. Jean Cocteau: “Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking towards me, without hurrying.”
  14. Washington Irving: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”
  15. Leo Tolstoy: “But the peasants…how do the peasants die?”
  16. Hans Christian Andersen: “Don’t ask me how I am! I understand nothing more.”
  17. Charles Dickens: “On the ground!” He suffered a stroke outside his home and was asking to be laid on the ground.
  18. H.G. Wells: “Go away! I’m all right.” He didn’t know he was dying.
  19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “More light.”
  20. W.C. Fields: “Goddamn the whole fucking world and everyone in it except you, Carlotta!” “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.
  21. Voltaire: “Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.” When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.
  22. Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies…I think that’s the record.”
  23. George Bernard Shaw: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
  24. Henry David Thoreau: “Moose…Indian.”
  25. James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?”

26. Oscar Wilde: “Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.”
27. Bob Hope: “Surprise me.” He was responding to his wife asking where he wanted to be buried.

reblogging because of Voltaire though

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neenorroar:

chrom-o-ween:

My favorite story is that one time Tolkien was with some writer friends and he was like “oh I’ve got a new story to show you guys” and one of them was like “as long as it’s not more fucking elves”

and it was

it was more fucking elves

This story is better when you know that the writer friend who said that was C.S. Lewis.

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authors insulting other authors

archaeologicals:

Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust 

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

Mark Twain on Jane Austen

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

William Faulkner on Mark Twain 

“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe 

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

Gore Vidal on Truman Capote

“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling

“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”