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Writing Quotes
"We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely."
3
"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."
3
"I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else."
3
"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
3
"Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up."
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"Write only if you wish to read it again and again while falling in love with it."
3
"Further editing deepens a story."
3
"Some people write letters, in the library."
3
"The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more."
3
"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."
3
"Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric."
3
"The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable."
3
"To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it."
3
"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."
3
"People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever."
3
"That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up."
3
"Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing."
3
"A true piece of writing sets you free."
3
"It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything."
3
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?"
3
"The writer is the cursed artist of the soul. The expression of his art is a reflection of his quest to understand man by unraveling the mysteries that have been haunting humankind from time immemorial. In the end of his journey to understand man, the writer becomes more human even though his soul ends up finding less peace."
3
"As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify."
3
"Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics."
3
"Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison."
3
"There is nothing to writing, all you have to do is, sit on the computer and bleed your thoughts."
3
"Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics."
3
"T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it."
3
"Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched."
3
"Writing a book is burning your brain to enlighten another man's mind."
3
"I'm not worried about plagiarism, I don't care if every person between here and Hell's creation put their name on my work as long as it ends up in the eyes of someone that found peace in the words."
3
"If I can write, who possibly can't. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing."
3
"I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."
3
"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."
3
"It is easy to have a lot of paintings or projects hanging around that are 'almost done.'"
3
"Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it."
3
"Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down."
3
"As for style of writing if one has anything to say it drops from him simply and directly as a stone falls to the ground."
3
"Writing is the flip side of sex - it's only good when it's over."
3
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
3
"By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry..."
3
"I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you."
3
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