WRITING QUOTES V

quotations about writing

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

attributed, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life

Tags: Flannery O'Connor


When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations

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When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

ISAAC ASIMOV

I, Asimov: A Memoir

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When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Slate, October 10, 2011


For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

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Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its power.

JOAN DIDION

Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

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Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language--squeezed out like a well-formed stool--what satisfaction! what bliss!

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977


One of the things that writers very quickly learn to avoid is talking their work away. Talking about your work hardens it prematurely, and weakens the charge. You need to keep a fluid sense of the work in hand--it has to be able to change almost without your being aware that it's changing.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Paris Review, fall 2004


I myself, as I'm writing, don't know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don't know the conclusion at all and I don't know what's going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don't know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there's no purpose to writing the story.

HURAKI MURAKAMI

Paris Review, summer 2004

Tags: Haruki Murakami


When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don't choose what kind of story it is or what's going to happen. I just wait.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Paris Review, summer 2004


Ideas are infinite--writers are hardwired to think that way. We keep it fresh by using new people, mixing character types and putting them in a different setting. It's always the first book all over again, but one idea can be told a thousand different ways. There are 88 keys on the piano, but you can make an infinite amount of music from those keys.

NORA ROBERTS

Time Magazine, November 29, 2007

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When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.

ELIF BATUMAN

interview, The Rumpus, April 25, 2012

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Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.

TOBSHA LEARNER

interview, Booktopia, February 22, 2011

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Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living--something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

Journal Intime

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Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about.

MAYA ANGELOU

Facebook post, October 13, 2012

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Each book starts from ashes.

PHILIP ROTH

interview with Cynthia Haven, "The Book Haven"

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You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.

ORSON SCOTT CARD

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

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I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

TANITH LEE

Realms of Fantasy, August 2009

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All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Moveable Feast

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Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.

DONALD BARTHELME

"On Paraguay"

Tags: Donald Barthelme