WRITING QUOTES X

quotations about writing

The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra


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

ROLAND BARTHES

The Pleasures of the Text


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

HILAIRE BELLOC

The Path to Rome

Tags: Hilaire Belloc


When I'm writing I find it's the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well. It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.

WILLIAM STYRON

The Paris Review, spring 1954


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


Writing is a part of healing, of digging into society.

KHALED KHALIFA

"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017


Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

interview, Ruminator Magazine, August/September 2005

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, Quit Your Day Job!

Tags: Kurt Vonnegut


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


Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyère


Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.

MARTIN AMIS

Essays


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

Tags: Elizabeth Bishop


Read heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market trends; they are fleeting.

JEFF ABBOTT

interview, Book Browse


I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me -- the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

ANAÏS NIN

diary, February 1954

Tags: Anaïs Nin


The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

CHRIS ABANI

interview, UTNE Reader, June 2010

Tags: Chris Abani


I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

SAM SHEPARD

The Observer, March 20, 2010

Tags: Sam Shepard


In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw


The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

MARTIN AMIS

The Information


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

Tags: John Barth


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

Tags: Edith Wharton