WRITING QUOTES XXXII

quotations about writing

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

Tags: Sam Shepard


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


The pen is mightier than the sword.

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON

Richelieu

Tags: Edward Bulwer Lytton


Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.

EDWARD ALBEE

introduction, Three Tall Women

Tags: Edward Albee


There's no magic bullet for being a decent writer, or making people bond with your characters or fall in love with your story. Writing is a million different skills and challenges, and each story is different. But the more I struggle to make this work, the more I think there's one key thing that makes writing more excellent: Finding your own blind spots as an author, and trying to see into them.

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

"The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do To Make Your Writing More Awesome", Gizmodo, February 25, 2016


Writing in the first person can be claustrophobic--everything that happens in the book is notionally filtered through the narrator, and one can long for the fresh air of another perspective. One can luxuriate in the peculiar world of a character, but there are limitations. Ironizing that person's experience is difficult. You need perhaps a candid old friend of the narrator who can tell a few truths the narrator prefers to ignore.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

The Paris Review, winter 2011

Tags: Alan Hollinghurst


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

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Death in the Afternoon


You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo

Tags: Don DeLillo


Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better. This is a powerful revelation, like the burning UFO wheel seen by the prophet Ezekiel, or like the McRib sandwich shaped like the Virgin Mary seen by the prophet Steve Jenkins. Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist past it are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? Or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?

CHUCK WENDIG

"25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection", Terrible Minds


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

Tags: Chris Abani


Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.

CHARLES SIMIC

attributed, Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things in Between


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

Tags: Charles Bukowski


In writing, as in speaking, less is more. When you are editing -- which should be immediately after you finish the writing for one session and again at least a day or more after you finished it -- look over the piece with a critical eye and cut, cut, cut.

ALI MADEEH HASHMI

"The art of writing", The News on Sunday, March 11, 2017


At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it--it will haunt you till it's written.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957

Tags: Truman Capote


Some writers love to boast that they can write anywhere: in a cafe, in a park -- some can probably write underwater in a cage with sharks circling. But again it smacks of the cultivated self-image. JK Rowling writing in a café with a baby = potential mythology? Hemingway famously claimed that he could create anywhere, explaining, "the only good place to work is your head" -- but we all know what he did to his head in the end.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

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


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 spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.

KELLY LINK

interview, Electric Lit, February 6, 2015

Tags: Kelly Link


In order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity.

JULIAN BARNES

The Paris Review, winter 2000


What I do as a writer, I work with situations, characters, certain situations and characters that appeal to me. And then, I try to imagine them and write the story that seems to flow from them. At a certain point, I can realize the themes are merging from this. But I never start from a thematic point of view, that I'm going to write about reinvention of self, identity, or any of these things. Usually, after the book is finished and I start talking about it, that it becomes analytical in that way. And in some ways it's a distortion of what the process has been, writing the book.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

interview, 3 AM Magazine