Quotes about writing

page 9

“It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.”

“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?"
Yes… the same age you will be if you don't.”

“I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.”

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”

“For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But HOW you played the Game.

"Alumnus Football”

“Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Cousin‟s Wife.
Moses must have forgotten to write that one down”

“If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.”

“Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.”

“To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.”

“Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.”

“I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.”

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

“write what readers want to read, which isn’t necessarily what you want to write.”

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all—no one’s around to write horror stories.”

“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”

“Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.”

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”

“When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

“It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.”

“Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.”

“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself… It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.”

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”

“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

“It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.”

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.”

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

“It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”

“Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.”

“Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.”

“Don't punish yourself,' she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”

“I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.”

“Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.”

“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”

“I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties…”

“When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.”

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write”

“Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?”

“It's four in the morning, the end of december
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.”

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

“Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

“not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.”

“A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.”

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.”

“Ragnor's important business was probably getting together to write a burn book with Raphael. Magnus could see them now, sharing a bench and scribbling happily away about Magnus's stupid hair.”

“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.”

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”

“If I made a joke about just dropping in, would you write me off as a cliche?”

“To memorize something, it's best to write it down.”

“I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.”

“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”

“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”

“She gave her a reason to write her own words, to see that words had also brought her to life.
"Don't punish yourself," she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

“We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole.”

“Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.”

“Write what you like; there is no other rule.”

“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.”

“The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”

“If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired”

“There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot… I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.”

“You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

“I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”

“Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.”

“Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork — reading, writing, thinking — can.”

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”

“The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks… Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.”

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”

“Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write”

“A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.”

“Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.”

“Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?'

Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.”

“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”

“I could not think without writing.”

“Write like it matters, and it will.”

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it’s done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.”

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”

“So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.”

“Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.”

“Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.”

“What is writing? Writing is telepathy.”

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”

“They write songs about California girls for a reason.”

“We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.”

“Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.”