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Writing Quotes
"Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person's own precursors: it revises a person's conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the "now, and alters the course and outcome person's future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person's thoughts, debunk a person's delusion, and analyze a person's values."
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"Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born."
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"Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person."
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"My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me."
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"Write what you want to write, don't fear about who will read it."
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"Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel."
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"As much as I encourage communication with my readers, I don't want reviews from them, simply because I don't need to be hamstrung in the middle of working on something."
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"Writing is a lonely business."
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"People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris."
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"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."
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"Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry."
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"I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers."
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"When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook-a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases."
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"I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it."
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"In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever."
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"The night it fallsThe stars shine throughThe inky blackThat is the cueFor plot demandsThat dreams be sownThe fantasies I have aloneThe words come fastThey flow like wineI am the midnight writer..."
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"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?"
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"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."
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"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."
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"No writing is effortless. I'm not saying you can't have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I'm not saying a character hasn't somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her."
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"An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years."
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"Writing is the geometry of the soul."
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"The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop."
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"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
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"I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur."
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"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."
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"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."
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"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."
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"Don't cry about it. Write about it."
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"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."
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"Writing is the flip side of sex - it's only good when it's over."
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"A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins."
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"Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases."
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"I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written."
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