Quotes About Writing

Writers can't write as fast as governments make wars; because to write demands thinking.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

Daphne Du Maurier and Anya Seton, all of Mary Stewart's early books, along with Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

Why I can report on a computer keyboard what I cannot bear to say aloud remains a mystery to me, but so it goes. Maybe my inability to speak propelled the obsessive reading and writing.

Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn't either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.

Even a dull life could make worthwhile reading, he said, provided the writer paid sufficient attention to detail.

Keep in mind that the only person to write for is yourself.Tell the story you most desperately want to read.

I debated whether to tell them I had long since abandoned my writing career and moved into radishes and fraud, but decided the timing was wrong.

Life is so full of portents and signs and symbols that it's a wonder not everyone is a writer.

A pencil is an extension of a finger writing in the sand. But our electronic media are extensions of our brains.

Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life. It is a comprehensive response to life.   Gregory McDonald        

After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

At first, I made a list of the difficult things that I was experiencing myself, like memory loss, sore knees, and fear of loneliness, and I set out to write an essay about each one.

wanted to teach myself how to get old without getting bitter. Then, as I kept on getting older, other things happened, both wonderful and painful. I became a grandmother, my mother died, and I kept on writing. Not only did I write about the things I didn't like that were happening to my body and my mind, I also wrote about how my relationships were changing because of age.

Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.

I loved the fresh alkaline tang of new ink and paper, a smell that never emanated from a broken-in library book. I loved the crack of a newly flexed spine, and the way the brand-new pages almost felt damp, as if they were wet with creation.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press -- a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, ...

Most writing doesn't take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

A book feels like a thing alive in the moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press—a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.