WRITING QUOTES X

quotations about writing

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

HILAIRE BELLOC

The Path to Rome

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In my view, if you write every day you're a certified graphomaniac, you're OCD, you're addicted to the physical act and not the real, spiritual one.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017


Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living--something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

Journal Intime

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I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

JOHN GREEN

Huffington Post, October 12, 2012


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

Tags: James Joyce


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

WILLIAM SHENSTONE

Essays on Men and Manners


Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default.

JOHN BARTH

The Paris Review, spring 1985

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Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

GRAHAM GREENE

Ways of Escape


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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We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

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The factors controlling a writer's popularity are as mysterious and ultimately as unknowable as the number of stars in the sky.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

interview, SF Site, April 2001

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To turn experience into speech -- that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it -- is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

JOHN BARTH

The End of the Road

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The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.

ROLAND BARTHES

The Pleasures of the Text


I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much.

HARPER LEE

interview with Roy Newquist, Counterpoints, 1964

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Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

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I can't avoid writing. It's a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

"Fast and Luce", Vanity Fair, March 1988

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Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you'd pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still -- do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-lectured, un-criticized, untaught?

VIRGINIA WOOLF

"Words Fail Me", BBC radio, April 29, 1937

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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 think it is essential to promote your work, since there are over 100,000 books published each year, and readers can fall in love with books they've never heard about.

DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS

interview, The Writer's Life

Tags: Douglas Carlton Abrams


Writing is about growth, challenge and change. Without those things, there's no joy in it.

VERONICA ROTH

"Best-Selling Author Veronica Roth Tells What Writing Books Is Really Like", Entrepreneur, March 30, 2017