Quotes About Writing

have to be on the cross and bleeding in order to have soul. They want you half mad, dribbling down your shirt front. I've had enough of the cross, my tank is full of that. If I can stay off the cross, I still have plenty to run on. Too much. Let them get on the cross, I'll congratulate them. But pain doesn't create writing, a writer does.

Too many writers write for the wrong reasons. They want to get famous or they want to get rich or they want to get laid by the girls with bluebells in their hair... When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing, but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it. When it's stuffed in your ears, nostrils, under your finger nails. It's when there's no hope but that.

Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.

The idea, of course, might be to let them know that writing needn't be hard work; the hard work is getting out of bed in the morning or at noon; the hard work is looking at people's faces in long supermarket lines; the hard work is working for somebody else who is making money using your life's hours and years.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

Sometimes you make a mistake, taking the wrong poem more often I make the mistake, writing it.

In the old days,' he said, 'writers' lives were more interesting than their writing. Now-a-days neither their lives nor the writing is interesting.

Writing is when I fly, writing is when I start fires. Writing is when I take death out of my left pocket, throw him against the wall and catch him as he bounces back.

by the way . . . I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it . . . ram a nipple up your scrotum. -printer: leave this in.)

The truth, however, was that there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.

I can sit down and vomit on the keys but it's my vomit. it's better than sitting in a room with 3 or 4 people and their pianos. this is my piano and it is better than theirs.

my god, they will say, all Chinaski writes about are cats! my god, they used to say, all Chinaski writes about are whores! the complainers will complain and keep buying my books: they love the way I irritate them.

anyhow, I'm now using the knife the reader sent me to clean my fingernails. better this than ripping it deep into somebody's guts. I prefer to do that with the poem.

There is nothing quite like the expectancy of the beginning writer, unless it is the conceit of the successful one.

There was something to be learned about writing from watching boxing matches or going to the racetrack. The message wasn't clear but it helped me. That was the important part: the message wasn't clear. It was wordless, like a house burning, or an earthquake or a flood, or a woman getting out of a car, showing her legs. I didn't know what other writers needed; I didn't care, I couldn't read them anyway. I was locked into my own habits

Scrivere poesie non è difficile. Difficile è viverle.

I had the dictionary at my elbow. Every now and then I would flip a page, find a large incomprehensible word and build a sentence or a paragraph out of the idea.

he still couldn't write or what he wrote didn't work because that tremendous brave optimism that buoyed everybody up so well during the depression just turned to sugar water during good times.

Chopin's bones are dead and they are shooting from the housetops and I sit in a dirty noisy kitchen in hell writing to Henry Miller.

Por la mañana era de día y yo seguía vivo. Quizás escriba una novela, pensé. Y eso hice.

There is nothing more magic and beautiful than lines forming across paper. It's all there is. It's all there ever was.

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.