quotations about writing
Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy ... it takes a mean author to write a good story.
GAIL CARSON LEVINE
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Writing Magic
When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don't. I'm not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think.
ADAM PHILLIPS
Bomb Magazine, fall 2010
What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
ROBERT STONE
The Paris Review, winter 1985
The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Twitter post, May 31, 2009
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
I've got splinters in my nose from the best publishing doors in town.
RITA MAE BROWN
interview, Time, March 18, 2008
I write fiction and I'm told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
PHILIP ROTH
Deception: A Novel
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, Bad TV: The Very Best of the Very Worst
Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.
MARKUS ZUSAK
"Why I Write", The Guardian, March 28, 2008
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
attributed, The Book of Poisonous Quotes
Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.
CHARLES SIMIC
attributed, Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things in Between
When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Barchester Towers
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.
ANITA BROOKNER
Look at Me
In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.
TOBIAS WOLFF
In Pharaoh's Army
In the end, the secret of writing is to be a tortoise, not a hare.
JONATHAN KELLERMAN
"Novelist explains how psychology training honed his writing", USC News, February 25, 2016
I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn't sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance; but one fine day when I was seventeen, I had my first, second, and third, all in the same morning's mail. Oh, I'm here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase!
TRUMAN CAPOTE
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957
I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing -- I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project -- it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Conversations with Zizek
I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.
KELLY LINK
"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006