Quotes About Writing

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

I've been killing characters my entire career, maybe I'm just a bloody minded bastard, I don't know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.

A twisted spine condemned him to walk with a limp, but as he said famously, "I do not limp when I read, nor when I write.

I need to write faster, but I make no promises. I found out long ago that when you look at the overall task, the cathedral you have to build, it looks so daunting that you just give up and sit down and play a video game.

I was a lot better at starting stories than I was at finishing them.

George R.R. Martin

If I had me a nice goose quill and a pot o' maester's ink, I could write down that me member was long and thick as me arm, wouldn't make it so.

Yet, if he would not lie, what could he write but truth?

It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time you write a book you roll the dice again.

The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best.

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The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

There are times in a man's life when writing a novel is like taking an angel in his arms. When I wrote this one, ten years ago, that was how I felt.

Writing, someone said, is turning blood into ink.

If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.

The almost-always-ghastly exclamation point has been lately compared to canned laughter.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears...

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.