Quotes about writing
page 15

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

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“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”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Life, Freedom

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Birth

“In a way, I was safe writing”

Franz Kafka Letter to His Father

Source: Letter to His Father

Way

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

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Books

“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.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

People

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Cats, Lovers, Past

“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."”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2

Thinking

“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?”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

Source: Dreamtigers

Past

“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.”

Patricia MacLachlan (1938) American writer of children's books

Source: Word After Word After Word

Time

“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.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Love, Feeling, Time

“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.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

Source: H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

Life, Pain, Disappointment, Reality

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

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Passion

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

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Why We Broke Up

Source: Why We Broke Up

Love, Truth

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

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

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

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Way, Gratitude

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

Roger Rosenblatt (1940) American writer

Source: Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing

Love, Making love, Justice, Intelligence

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

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

Way

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

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936), Afterword of a later edition

Painting

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

James M. Cain (1892–1977) Novelist, short story writer, journalist

Waiting

“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.”

Ezra Pound The Cantos

Canto CXX (the concluding Canto of the 1975 edition of The Cantos')
The Cantos

Love, God, Forgiveness

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

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Life

“[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.)”

David Halberstam (1934–2007) American writer, journalist, historian

Source: Everything They Had: Sports Writing

Love, Feeling, Quotes

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

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Motivational, Deep, Success, Inspirational

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

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: What Happens in London

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

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

Susanna Clarke (1959) British author

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

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Time

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

Michael Swanwick (1950) American science fiction author

“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”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

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

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Women, Thinking

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

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Studies
Essays (1625)

Reading, For Men

“I'm a drinker with writing problems.”

Brendan Behan (1923–1964) Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright

Problem

“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.”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

Books, Personality

“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.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

“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.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Journal entry (1938), quoted in the Introduction to a 1994 edition of Of Mice and Men by Susan Shillinglaw, p. vii
Context: 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. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

Love, Men, Hate, World

“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.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Thinking, Learning, Reading, Help

“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.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

People, Faith, Beauty, Christ

“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.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564)
Context: Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
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.

Men, Courage, Laughter, Heart

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

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

History, Cute

“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.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Way, Time

“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.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

Source: The World of Winnie-the-Pooh

Books

“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.”

Marguerite Duras book The Lover

Source: The Lover

Books, Thinking, Hurt

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

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Personality

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

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

"American Rhetoric: Joss Whedon - Equality Now Address" (15 May 2006) http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/josswhedonequalitynow.htm

Question, Strong

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

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Idea

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

James M. Cain (1892–1977) Novelist, short story writer, journalist

Night

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

Craig Claiborne (1920–2000) Journalist and book author

Love

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

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Time

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

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

“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.”

Joe Haldeman (1943) American science fiction writer

Books, Falseness

“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.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Nature

“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.”

Nick Hornby (1957) English novelist

“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.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

Freedom, Personality

“…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.”

Anthony Horowitz Alex Rider

Source: Snakehead

Life, Books

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

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Solitude

“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.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Life, Way

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Youth

“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.”

Thomas Pynchon (1937) American novelist

Source: Slow Learner: Early Stories

Life, Thinking

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

Robert Hass (1941) American poet

Hell

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

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Life, Dogs

“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.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Life, Truth

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

Joe Haldeman (1943) American science fiction writer

Future

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

Charles Bukowski book Post Office

Source: Post Office

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

Thomas Berger (1952) German writer

“We write to make sense of it all.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Sense

“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.”

Zadie Smith (1975) British writer

Time

“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.”

Joan Didion (1934) American writer

Fear, Thinking

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

Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986) Poet, writer and translator

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

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Change

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

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

“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.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

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

Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) American dramatist and screenwriter

“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.”

Georgette Heyer (1902–1974) British historical romance and detective fiction novelist

Literature, Thinking

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

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Music, Study

“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!”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Time, Daughters, Speed

“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.”

Jean M. Auel (1936) Novelist

Thinking, Learning, Reading

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

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

“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.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Source: Honey and Salt

Heart, Summer, Housing

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

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

“Write what should not be forgotten.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

“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.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Acknowledgements, p. 549
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000)

Books, Idea, Bee, Reading

“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.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Books, Game, Thinking, Time

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

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

Reality

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

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Letter to Fanny Guillermet (Zurich, 5 September 1918)

Reading

“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.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Waiting, Forgetting

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

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

The New York Times (20 October 1985)

Learning

“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.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

Art, Learning

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

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

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

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Books

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

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Variant: I love you now for what we've already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that's to come.
Source: The Notebook

Love, Reading

“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.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, pp. 115-116) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html <br class="br">Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

Sense, Drawing