WRITING QUOTES XII

quotations about writing

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

JAMES JOYCE

interview with Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine, 1929?

Tags: James Joyce


In my view, if you write every day you're a certified graphomaniac, you're OCD, you're addicted to the physical act and not the real, spiritual one.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017


If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

New York Times, October 25, 1959

Tags: John Dos Passos


When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?

DAVID SEDARIS

Oasis Magazine, June 2008

Tags: David Sedaris


The factors controlling a writer's popularity are as mysterious and ultimately as unknowable as the number of stars in the sky.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

interview, SF Site, April 2001

Tags: Samuel R. Delany


It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.

EDITH WHARTON

"The Legend", Tales of Men and Ghosts

Tags: Edith Wharton


I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book. Sometimes I guess it's best just to forget there's an audience and just write like no one will ever read it at all.

MARKUS ZUSAK

"Why I Write", The Guardian, March 28, 2008


The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

The Paris Review, fall 2000


Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born

Tags: Emil Cioran


The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

"The Business of a Novelist"


Writing is -- at least for me -- movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen -- and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives -- on paper to boot! -- towards incarnation.

HEINRICH BÖLL

Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973


The life of a writer is absolute hell ... if he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

ROALD DAHL

Boy

Tags: Roald Dahl


The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

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My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

GRAHAM GREENE

International Herald Tribune, October 7, 1977


If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.

MARTIN AMIS

"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 21, 2013

Tags: Martin Amis


The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mystery and Manners


Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

JOHN STEINBECK

Quote Magazine, June 18, 1961

Tags: John Steinbeck


My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

CHINA MIÉVILLE

The Guardian, September 20, 2012


In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw