quotations about writing
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Paris Review, spring 1958
I do everything they tell you not to. I go back and fix things as I go, otherwise I can't move forward. I don't write every day, I write in binges. I don't write drafts, what I write, fixed as I go, is pretty much what gets published. Everybody writes differently, and there are a lot of people who want everybody to write in the same way, people who have a lot invested in telling people to write a whole crappy first draft and then revise it, and so on. That absolutely doesn't work for me. I tell people there are things they can try, and things that might help, but there aren't any rules, except to do what works for you, what gets the story on the page.
JO WALTON
interview, RT Book Reviews
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
Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.
CHRIS ABANI
attributed, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction
I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Washington Post, November 13, 2009
When we attempt to articulate our tender feelings in writing, we enter an inner dialogue of self-exploration: we forage for the more precise word, the more resonant phrasing. If the writing is done with particular care and attention, there is a Goldilocks quality to it: We rustle through an assortment of terms, discarding one, perhaps as "too weak" or another "too ordinary" until we settle upon the one that is "just right". In doing so, we have discovered something about ourselves.
DANIEL GRIFFIN
"Don't Tell Him You Love Him... Put It in Writing", Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.
DAVID SEDARIS
interview, Bohemian, June 2009
It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.
EDITH WHARTON
"The Legend", Tales of Men and Ghosts
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
JAMES JOYCE
letter to Fanny Guillermet, September 5, 1918
He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Slate, October 10, 2011
There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
New York Times, November 23, 1941
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
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
KURT VONNEGUT
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations
To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
MARK TWAIN
"How to Tell a Story"
You might get the impression that I have a mild contempt for storytelling, which is only somewhat true. For example, I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things. In my case, I think I start from the opposite point. At first, I don't obey, I don't plot, but then from time to time, I say to myself, Come on, there's got to be a story. I control myself. But I will never give up a beautiful fragment merely because it doesn't fit in the story.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
The Paris Review, fall 2010
You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.
PETER ABRAHAMS
End of Story
When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
STEPHEN KING
Entertainment Weekly, August 17, 2007
I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.
TANITH LEE
Realms of Fantasy, August 2009