Quotes About Writing

Rules such as Write what you know, and Show, don't tell, while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Often the things that pop out of my typewriter regale me, especially when I am trying to say something else and in a different way only to have a kind of metamorphosis take place during the act of typing and?­Ã¢â'¬â€¢­whammo!?­Ã¢â'¬â€¢a concept I hadn't counted on is strutting it's vaudeville on the page.

this is not the first time that intimidation by typewriter has caused me to consider the pen.

So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing class is, 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write anything you can imagine.

And, after all, winning business is what writing proposals is all about.

Image of a Roman wax tablet, which looks very like an iPad.

This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.

Words) deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

You're a writer. You write because you're a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way contradicting yourself.

Literature is not always a voluntary act

Kad u glavi imamo re?enice, mislio sam, još uvek nemamo odlu?nost i da ih stavimo na papir. Re?enice nas plaše, najpre nas plaši misao, onda re?enica, naposletku to što tu re?enicu možda više nemamo u glavi kada ho?emo da je zapišemo. Vrlo ?esto neku re?enicu prerano zapišemo, neku, opet, prekasno; re?enicu moramo da zapišemo u pravom trenutku, ina?e je zauvek izgubljena.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.