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Writing Quotes
"Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books."
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"Writing is a competition between the writer and the page. When the page wins, you fail as a writer."
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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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"Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone."
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"The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects."
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"Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand."
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"People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars."
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"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."
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"I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
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"How do you paint a writer's block?Just fill it with fifty shades of black."
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"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."
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"That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up."
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"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
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"If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'."
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"There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story "plot "continuity... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer..."
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"Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one."
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"I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day."
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"We do not write because we want to, we write because we have to."
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"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
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"London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
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"Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate."
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"I know I am talking nonsense, but I'd rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes."
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"Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person."
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"A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it."
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"An author's operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature."
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"To write a good love letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written."
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"Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist."
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"If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. If someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say: 'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!"
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"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
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"In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society nor government is very fond of writers. The two are completely opposite approaches toward literature."
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"Editing one's writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle."
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"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an actionis through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire letrun, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It canonly be dynamic. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do."
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"When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind."
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"I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book."
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"My early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out..."
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