quotations about writing
You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"The Shadow Maker", The Telegraph, November 27, 2005
If there's a character type I despise, it's the all-capable, all-knowing, physically perfect protagonist. My idea of hell would be to be trapped in a four-hundred page, first-person, first-tense, running monologue with a character like that. I think writers who produce characters along those lines should graduate from high school and move on.
CRAIG JOHNSON
"A Conversation with Craig Johnson", The Cold Dish
All Writing Is Garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially today.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
I believe so. In its beginning, dialogue's the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it goes on, it's the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function. Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once--reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth--all in his single speech. And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook in concentrated form. This isn't to say I succeeded. But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing.
EUDORA WELTY
The Paris Review, fall 1972
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
I like that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing--that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around. They're the best moments in a day of writing -- when an image appears that you didn't know would be there when you started work in the morning.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.
JOHN GREEN
Huffington Post, October 12, 2012
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
PHILIP ROTH
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work With the Right One For You
In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck.
BOB LONSBERRY
official website
Writing is creative, which is right brain activity. Editing is rational, logical and process/rule driven, which is left-brain activity. It seems that, if you switch consistently between the two, the creative process becomes derailed by all the rules and forms. You scare it back into the shadows.
DAVID CHISLETT
"Editing Is Not Writing", Books LIVE, February 12, 2016
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
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Sweater"
I think it is essential to promote your work, since there are over 100,000 books published each year, and readers can fall in love with books they've never heard about.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
interview, The Writer's Life
Write only of what is important and eternal.
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Seagull
I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.
JACK LONDON
"Getting Into Print", Editor magazine, 1903
When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.
HEINRICH BÖLL
Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973
When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997