top of page
.png){kind=small}
Writing Quotes
"I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all."
12
"You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it."
12
"The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning."
12
"In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better."
12
"Just after writing those we were called up to defend a new position on the left, where the terrible storming of the bridge over the Antietam took place."
12
"The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession."
12
"The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you."
12
"Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party."
12
"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."
12
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."
12
"Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics."
12
"Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders."
12
"You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't."
12
"No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered."
12
"Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again."
12
"The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?"
12
"Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself."
12
"Write about the desire you dare to dream."
12
"I'm honestly as happy writing Superman Adventures as I am writing Wanted."
12
"I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences."
12
"The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter."
12
"Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult."
12
"A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme."
12
"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you."
12
"Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels."
12
"It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step."
12
"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
12
"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."
12
"A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood."
12
bottom of page