quotations about writing
Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.
GERALD ASHER
speech at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, February 2011
Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN
Essay on Satire
Without a pen in my hand I can't think.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication
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
The Paris Review, fall 1975
No reason at all why one should go on writing just for the sake of it. I think it is very important to stop when you haven't got anything to say.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000
You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
KELLY LINK
"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013
I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.
KIRBY LARSON
interview, Author Turf, March 6, 2014
In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
After a few days of writing I am as happy to see people as if I've been marooned on a desert island for a month.
ROSEMARY JENKINSON
"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
You have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind your best ideas.
TOBIAS WOLFF
The Missouri Review, 2003
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, May 4, 1942
First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.
CHARLES READE
Peg Woffington
It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Okike, 1990
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