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Writing Quotes
"When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!"
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"A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair."
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"Looking back, I wince at the careless way I tossed out my opinions."
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"I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
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"For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working."
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"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."
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"Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better."
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"We do not write because we want to, we write because we have to."
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"The good writing ideas don't have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart."
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"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."
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"Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing."
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"We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting."
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"I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest."
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"I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority."
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"A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through."
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"Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience."
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"When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write."
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"Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind."
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"I'm likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight."
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"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
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"How do you paint a writer's block?Just fill it with fifty shades of black."
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"Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected."
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"Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go."
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"Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book."
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"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns."
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"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
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"A writer leads a hyphenated-life with words."
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"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
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"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."
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"In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm."
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"If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story."
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"Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person's life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person's maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting being. Writing our personal story, we discover new dimensions of our being."
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"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."
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