Quotes about writing

page 15

“In a way, I was safe writing”

“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.”

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

“I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.”

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."”

“What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”

“You will have a story in there… or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.”

“The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.”

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

“If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself”

“He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.”

“But it’s December now, and the sky is bright, and it’s clear to me. I’m telling you why we broke up, Ed. I’m writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.”

“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.”

“My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

“Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and… to make love possible”

“There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.”

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”

“You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.”

“I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak.
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.”

“Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.”

“[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"

(, interview with Budd Mishkin;, March 25, 2007.)”

“Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.”

“When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.”

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

“The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.”

“A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.”

“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”

“But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.”

“Writing is a matter of finding the appropriate balance of dinosaurs and sodomy.”

“You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

“I'm a drinker with writing problems.”

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”

“You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.”

“In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.”

“I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.”

“My chief desire in all my writings, is to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and make Him beautiful and glorious in the eyes of people; and to promote the increase of repentance, faith, and holiness upon earth.”

“That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.”

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

“Dear John, tell me everything. Write it all down, that way, we’ll be with each other all the time, even if we’re not with each other at all.”

“And now all the others are saying, "What about Us?" So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.”

“When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more… exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”

“A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.”

“Q: So, why do you write these strong female characters?
A: Because you’re still asking me that question.”

“The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.”

“If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either”

“I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.”

“Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.”

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

“If I could, I'd write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence”

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.”

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

“…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me…”

"I’ve never much cared for horror stories.”

“Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.”

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.”

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.”

“I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.”

“There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.”

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.”

“Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.”

“We write to make sense of it all.”

“We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.”

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.”

“I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

“Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?”

“Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”

“I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense…. But it's unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.”

“When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.”

“One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter - who was a child at the time - asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!”

“You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”

“You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.”

“Come clean with a child heart
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind
Let rain on a house roof be a song
Let the writing on your face
be a smell of apple orchards on late June.”

“Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.”

“Write what should not be forgotten.”

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.”

“Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

“Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.”

“I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.”

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”

“I love you now as I write this, and I love you now as you read this”

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

“Do not let your zeal for the cause of democracy deceive you as to the fact of the opaque ignorance in which the great bulk of the people of England are wrapt. If you write for the masses politically, and write soundly and honestly, they will not be able at present to appreciate you, and consequently will not support you…There is no remedy for all this but improved education. Such as the tail and the body are, such will be the character of the head. Nature does not produce such monsters as an ignorant or vicious community, and virtuous and wise leaders. In Scotland you are better off because you are better educated. The great body of the English peasants are not a jot advanced in intellect since the days of their Saxon ancestors. I hope you will join us in a cry for schoolmasters as a first step to Radicalism.”

“(A) writer, a man I loved and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could do anything, just as my parents had believed all those years ago, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine. And he loved Ireland, and the fax was invented so we writers could live anywhere we liked, instead of living in London near publishers.”

“We do, to what extent of freedom we have earned or are allowed by others and ourselves, what we most want to do. We say - speak, paint, carve, write, express ourselves… as we damn please. And in both the doing of things and the talking about them - which together seem to me to sum up life - we so crave freedom or liberty or whatever one may choose to call it as to justify our Declaration's romantically terming it an unalienable right of Man, bestowed on Man by his Creator.”

“The council that will write the constitution should be elected, not hand-picked … The constitution will be illegal if it is written by a council, whether that is chosen by the Americans or by what is called the Governing Council or by anyone else.”

“What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.”