WRITING QUOTES VII

quotations about writing

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion

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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

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So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of -- as opposed to thinking about themselves -- and to which they have not yet given expression.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove

Tags: Marcel Proust


Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo


The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.

CHARLES DE LINT

"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013

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Fine writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a labored style.

WILLIAM SHENSTONE

Essays on Men and Manners


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

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Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra


To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

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Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen

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There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

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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


Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite, and I try to learn as much as I can on my own before I show it to my editor at The New Yorker. I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft.

DAVID SEDARIS

Oasis Magazine, June 2008


When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Notebooks


You are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The Motion of Light in Water

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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.

REBECCA WEST

The Paris Review, spring 1981

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There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living -- cook books and detective stories.

REX STOUT

Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout

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When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.

MAYA ANGELOU

The Paris Review, fall 1990

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I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"Q & A: Author Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Time, June 30, 2009

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