Quotes About Writing

I experienced a loss of pleasure in writing!

So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing.

Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent "doing nothing." He published more than two hundred novels.

history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers)

No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.

Further, many writers and scholars speak in private, say, after half a bottle of wine, differently from the way they do in print. Their writing is certifiably fake, fake. And many of the problems of society come from the argument "other people are doing it." So if I call someone a dangerous ethically challenged fragilista in private after the third glass of Lebanese wine (white), I will be obligated to do so here.

I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about - and the reader is no fool. So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing.Yet some psychologists and behavioral economists seem to think that procrastination is a disease to be remedied and cured.

Il mio mestiere è scrivere delle storie, cose inventate o cose che ricordo della mia vita ma comunque storie, cose dove non c'entra la cultura ma soltanto la memoria e la fantasia. Questo è il mio mestiere, e io lo farò fino alla morte

You really have to love words if you're going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words.

What is your suggestion for someone who wants to start writing? Be a reader. It's the only real way to learn how to tell a story.

I have a penchant, an appetite for writing lives, even unhappy ones, in the course of which the person holds on to a certain dignity up to the end, in spite of the disappointments, the things unfinished, the suffering…

In later years I never put aside this kind of inquiry, that is, into the modes of thinking and representation embedded in a text, but I asked new questions about ways of writing and the forms and rituals of discourse. I began to look not only at what was stated or declared in a text, but also at what was suggested through expression, through performance.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to fix a poem.

all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust

There's a lot of work, a lot of writing, to be done, and there's no telling when the results will begin to show. But if Atlas Shrugged sells 50,000 copies, this culture's cooked.

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

When we see how little we can express, it is a wonder that any man ever takes up a pen a second time.

The act of self-expression—through writing a journal or letters—often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears.

I've long since learned to be wary of Melissa's sighs. Whenever I finish the draft of a chapter, I read it to her out loud—usually while she's washing the dishes after dinner. Not only does this get me out of doing the dishes, but it provides some extremely helpful, if on occasion devastating, feedback.

Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.

There's this thing in my head that I have to purge onto the page before it changes the shape of my brain.

A scythe's journal is traditionally made of lambskin parchment and kid leather." "I assume you mean 'kid' as in 'goat,'" Rowan said, "and not 'kid' as in 'kid.