quotations about writing
So basically, it's totally selfish why I write. There are more harmful ways to spend your time, is how I justify it I guess. If my stories can make others laugh, or make others feel unexpected and complicated emotions, well then it's more than feeling good, then it's a bonus, then its rewarding, then you're building community.
TYLER BARTON
"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016
Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories
One of the things that writers very quickly learn to avoid is talking their work away. Talking about your work hardens it prematurely, and weakens the charge. You need to keep a fluid sense of the work in hand--it has to be able to change almost without your being aware that it's changing.
TOBIAS WOLFF
The Paris Review, fall 2004
I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.
JANE AUSTEN
letter to Cassandra Austen, October 26, 1813
I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008
It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To keep writing was always a first priority.... I worked probably 25 years by myself.... Just writing and working, not trying to publish much. Not giving readings. A longer time than people really are willing to commit before they want to go public.
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1992
I myself, as I'm writing, don't know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don't know the conclusion at all and I don't know what's going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don't know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there's no purpose to writing the story.
HURAKI MURAKAMI
Paris Review, summer 2004
I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character--the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Paris Review, winter 1998
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
HURAKI MURAKAMI
Hear the Wind Sing
It is hard to make a good documentary about writing. Writing is internal, it slowly takes shape in a mind, sometimes after the not very cinematic process of staring at a wall until the words come.
JULIA COOPER
"Obit doc examines the art of the obituary at The New York Times", The Globe and Mail, March 30, 2017
To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence--words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
ADRIENNE RICH
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"The Art of Metaphor"
Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Enemies of Promise
Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954
It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Goal
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
For me, writing is just a thing I need to do everyday, like breathing or eating.
GUY CAPECELATRO III
"Power of music shines in Capecelatro's heartfelt album", Seacoast Online, March 30, 2017
I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them.
KELLY LINK
"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010