Quotes about writing

page 14

“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”

“You write in order to change the world… if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”

“It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.”

“He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good”

“Writing is one of the few careers for which you essentially train yourself, the other two major ones being juggling and pickpocketing.”

“When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.”

“I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.”

“Let love write on you for awhile.”

“Life is easier when you can write off others as monsters, demon, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared the thing is you can't do that without becoming them, just a little.”

“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”

“All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.”

“I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours”

“All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair… Come to it any way but lightly.”

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”

“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:
‘Er, garçon.’
‘M’sieur?’
‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous savez—et une envelope et une plume.’
The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.
‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings.
‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’
‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’
‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter.”

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.”

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

“Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people.”

“I keep thinking about blood. I dream about it. Wake up thinking about it. Pretty soon I'll be writing morbid emo poetry about it.”

“The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.”

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.”

“If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.”

“It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.”

“Writing is a delicious agony.”

“Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere.”

“I didn't lie, I was writing fiction with my mouth."

Homer Simpson”

“I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.”

“I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.”

“Writing is a constant exercise in longing.”

“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.”

“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”

“If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!”

“If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.”

“The Writer's Oath

I promise solemnly:

1. to write as often and as much as I can,

2. to respect my writing self, and

3. to nurture the writing of others.

I accept these responsibilities and shall honor them always.”

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.”

“It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky
like that, I wish I could write music”

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”

“I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

“According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.”

“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”

“All writing is filth”

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”

“I write emotional algebra.”

“He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well…”

“Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”

“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”

“Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.”

“… Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?”

“The most important story we'll ever write in life is our own—not with ink, but with our daily choices.”

“… classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.”

“I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example…”

“If suddenly you do not exist,
If suddenly you are not living,
I shall go on living.

I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.

I shall go on living.”

“I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.”

“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.”

“Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”

“I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.”

“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”

“The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”

“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”

“The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.”

“I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.”

“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”

“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.”

“Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.”

“When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.”

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.”

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”

“As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.”

“Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty… It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.”

“I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.”

“Let us have integrity and not write checks with our tongues which our conduct cannot cash.”

“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."

(, November 1913)”

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”

“If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.”

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”

“When I write, I don't translate for white readers…. Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.”

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.”

“Does he write to you? Never a line. Does he send you a message? Never a word. It is because he loves you, poor fool, and is trying to forget you, since you are not free to listen to him or to belong to him.”

“You ask me why I do not write something… I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.”

“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”

“But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”

“Writing is the flip side of sex - it's only good when it's over.”

“People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”

“Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.”

“Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.”

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”