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Writing Quotes
"It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down."
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"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
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"Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor."
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"The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud."
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"You have a great advantage as a writer, Monsieur,' said Poirot. 'You can relieve your feelings by expedient of the printed word. You have the power of the pen over your enemies."
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"I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week."
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"Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it."
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"When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it."
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"It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think."
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"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."
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"The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine."
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"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."
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"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."
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"If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance."
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"The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters."
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"After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together."
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"If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin."
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"The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product."
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"It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing."
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"I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!"
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"There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part."
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"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
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"I don't want to say I hear voices; well, actually I do hear voices, but I don't think it's supernatural. I think it's just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own."
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"I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue."
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"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny - that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."
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"What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse."
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"A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't."
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"Your audience is one single reader. I have found that 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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"In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary."
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"In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class."
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