Quotes About Writing

How can you write if you can't cry?

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear, pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.

The pen is mightier than the sword. The [??n!$] is mightier than the pen.

Age 59. — With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I don't know anything but the simplest rules of English grammar, and I seldom consciously apply them. Nevertheless, I instinctively write correctly and, I like to think, in an interesting fashion. I know when something sounds right and when it doesn't, and I can tell the difference without hesitation, even when writing at breakneck speed. How do I do this? I haven't the faintest idea.

My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going . . . whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor.

Dan je samo bela hartija na kojoj se sve beleži iispisuje, a ra?un se pla?a no?u, na velikim, mra?nim i vrelim poljima nesanice. Ali tu se i sve rešava ibriše, kona?no i nepovratno. Svaka preboljena patnja nestaje tu kao reka ponornica, ili sagori beztraga i spomena.

It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning

The answer, of course, was that the stories had been written as well as could be expected given the tools I had when I wrote them. Every writer starts with the same toolbox, which at most might contain a screwdriver and a pair of rusty pliers, and there's not much you can make with that. Each finished story adds a new tool to the box that assists in the construction of better stories going forward, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the prior work.

Brodie said. "I've done a little work on a few of your places.

Your book is bloated and self-indulgent

Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task.

The truth is, he tired of criticism, tired of prose measured by the yard. --Disgrace

What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?

We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?

She is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed.

In the act of writing he experiences, today, an exceptional sensual pleasure -- in the feel of the pen, snug in the crook of his thumb, but even more in the feel of his hand being tugged back lightly from its course across the page by the strict, unvarying shape of the letters, the discipline of the alphabet.