“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”
Alan Dean Foster (1946) American fiction writer
Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 4, Style, p. 21.
“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”
Alan Dean Foster (1946) American fiction writer
“Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.”
Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“In the case of a writer like Musil writing is often a graceful act, like a silvery fish leaping.”
Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times
p 37
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)
Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer
On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)
“Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.”
Thomas Berger (1952) German writer
“You do not so act as to avoid Hell and enter Heaven.”
Ibrahim ibn Adham (718–776) ascetic Sufi saint
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 27
Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist
Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories. p. 327 (1958)
1950s
Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin