quotations about writing
Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it--that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book.
PHILIP ROTH
Paris Review, fall 1984
If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Teacher", Winesburg, Ohio
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
"In Conversation: Fran Lebowitz with Phong Bui", The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2014
I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool--and I'm not any of those--to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990
If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
A Story Teller's Story
The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. But what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
DON DELILLO
Conversations with Don DeLillo
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
SAUL BELLOW
Nobel lecture, December 12, 1976
Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.
CARMEN BOULLOSA
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1995
Go to any lengths to avoid preachiness! If you have to choose between the message and the story, always choose the story.
ELIZABETH ZELVIN
interview, The Fix
The pen is mightier than the sword.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
Richelieu
Writing can't be a way of life -- the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
DORIS LESSING
Doris Lessing: Conversations
I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.
SAM SHEPARD
The Paris Review
Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
J. D. SALINGER
attributed, Salinger: A Biography
I truly believe that writing is a continuum--so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.
CHRIS ABANI
interview, UTNE Reader, June 2010
You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
DORIS LESSING
The New York Times, April 22, 1984
There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions -- is he tall, is he short? -- he had better quit.
REX STOUT
The New York Times, November 15, 1953
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, The Writer's Quotation Book