Quotes about writing

page 11

“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets… when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

“You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

“It's like you're a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, 'I'm sorry, but this role isn't right for me'. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing.”

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

“Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.”

“A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.”

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

“All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them! D'you see?”

“They're just memories now. Time to write them off.”

“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.”

“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”

“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”

“I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.”

“If you own this story you get to write the ending.”

“Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. "I write only when inspiration strikes," he replied. "Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”

“You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.”

“I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like.”

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

“There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for
life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….
If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,
not what pays”

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

“i still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…”

“If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge.”

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”

“Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..”

“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be finished. No matter how much I write, there will always be something I should’ve said.”

“God writes a lot of comedy, Donna; the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.”

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”

“Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?”

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

“Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.”

“Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.”

“I cannot write to anyone outside myself--if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please.”

“If your life is worth thinking about, it is worth writing about.”

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

“He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”

“I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.”

“Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.”

“If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”

“Writing is a bit like being a god”

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining... researching... talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

“My letters are for when I don't want to be in love anymore. They're for good-bye. Because after I write in my letter, I'm not longer consumed by my all-consuming love… My letters set me free. Or at least they're supposed to.”

“Cal: “Could you write a little bigger? I’m not sure China saw that.”
Every Boy's Got One”

“Freedom is… the right to write the wrong words.”

“The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”

“I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted.”

“It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.”

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on”

“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”

“‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.”

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

“Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.”

“I don't know what's wrong with me. It's like all I can do is keep writing this gibberish to keep from breaking apart.”

“Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.”

“There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.”

“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”

“Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.”

“Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.”

“It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.”

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

“Writing is the thing that props me up.”

“Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.”

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”

“If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.”

“I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.”

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

“She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not ‘til the day he dies. Not even then.”

“When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

“Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.”

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”

“My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in”

“I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.”

“Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.”

“I’m asking the questions tonight.” One day I was going to write a book: How to Dictate to a Dictator
and Evade an Evader, subtitled How to Handle Jericho Barrons.”

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

“I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.”

“I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.”

“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”

“I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.”

“When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.”

“Write about us,” Robinson urged. “Tell our story.” And I did it; I told our story. You hold it in your hands.”

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

“A writer should read until he is filled to the brim and like a pitcher which is over-filled over flows. And then he should write.”

“We don't usually write up accidents involving rabbits.
- Joe Morelli”

“Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.”

“I do not like to write - I like to have written.”

“Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.”