quotations about writing
I don't begin a novel with a shopping list--the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.
WILLIAM GIBSON
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The Paris Review, summer 2011
The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The New Russian Prose
You have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind your best ideas.
TOBIAS WOLFF
The Missouri Review, 2003
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
What I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers. There I've hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story's to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of aspidistra.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"An Unfinished Novel", The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
THOMAS WOLFE
The Autobiography of an American Novelist
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
THOMAS MANN
Essays of Three Decades
Brevity is the sister of talent.
ANTON CHEKHOV
letter to A. P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889
Everything you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of everything you touch.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
"The Elder Tree Mother"
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
ANN PATCHETT
Truth and Beauty
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
I believe in writing somewhat quickly, getting the story down; it can be bad, it can be a mess, but the key thing is to get it down.
JEFF ABBOTT
"Rules of Fiction with Jeff Abbott", Suspense Magazine, January 19, 2017
I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.
JEFF ABBOTT
Publisher's Weekly, May 30, 2011
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
TOM ROBBINS
"In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe", New York Times, December 30, 1993
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work with the Right One for You
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Letters
Now, writing every day, and being paid for it and encouraged to do it, it was as if, in the midst of the clichéd dark and stormy night, I found the magical inn, its windows golden lit, and Summer was due to start tomorrow. I can only work at one thing well. Deprive me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing.
TANITH LEE
interview, Intergalactic Medicine Show