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Writing Quotes
"There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily."
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"So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence."
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"The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers."
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"But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless."
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"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
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"Writing has become such an outlet for me that when I don't have it, I just get pent up."
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"I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second."
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"I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic."
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"I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose."
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"She worded it a bit strongly, but I do find myself more and more struck by the differences between the sexes. To put it another way: All marriages are mixed marriages."
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"Every word an author writes causes ripples, like tossing a stone into a pond. And you don't know where they'll go, or who they'll touch, or when they might come back to you. I think everything you do is kind of like that, too."
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"I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant."
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"I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned."
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"I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem."
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"I don't recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories."
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"But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends."
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"Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think."
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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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"It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all."
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"Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing."
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"If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination."
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"My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages."
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"Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds."
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"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
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"We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy."
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