Quotes About Writing

Qué lector modelo quería yo mientras escribía? Un cómplice, sin duda, que entrase en mi juego. Lo que yo quería era volverme totalmente medieval y vivir en el Medievo como si fuese mi época (y viceversa).

qué influencia tuvieron Gemma sobre Dante o Helena sobre Descartes, por no hablar de las muchísimas esposas que la historia ignora? ¿Y si todas las obras de Aristóteles en realidad las hubiera escrito su esposa Erpilis? Nunca lo sabremos. La historia, escrita por los maridos, ha condenado a las esposas al anonimato.

I began writing in March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.

Eski bir atasözünün dediÄŸi gibi, tüy kalemi üç parmak tutar, ama tüm beden çal???r.

B]ut newspapers nowadays had too many pages, no one could proof everything before it went to press, and even the major newspapers were now writing "Simone de Beauvoire," or "Beaudelaire," or "Roosvelt," and the proofreader was becoming as outmoded as the Gutenberg press.

there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader. Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.

As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches. -Adso of Melk

Escribía como simple juego mecánico, para reflexionar en solitario sobre sus propios errores, se engañaba pensando que no estaba «creando» porque la creación, aun cuando es fuente de error, siempre se produce por amor a alguien distinto de nosotros.

You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences. If they come into your head, write them, but then break them down. Do not be afraid to repeat the subject twice, and stay away from too many pronouns and subordinate clauses.

Begin new paragraphs often. Do so when logically necessary, and when the pace of the text requires it, but the more you do it, the better. Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft.

Descubrí, pues, que una novela no tiene nada que ver, en principio, con las palabras. Escribir una novela es una tarea cosmológica, como la que se cuenta en el Génesis (ya decía Woody Allen que los modelos hay que saber elegirlos).

Yazar, yazd?ktan sonra ölmelidir. Metnin gidiÅŸini bozmamak için.

hay dos clases de poetas: los buenos, que queman sus poemas a los dieciocho años, y los malos, que siguen escribiendo poesía mientras

Lampedusa, Bassani y Cassola. Por mi parte, hoy

JednÄ… tylko rzecz pisze siÄ™ dla siebie i jest to lista zakupów. SÅ'u?y do zapamiÄ™tania, co masz kupi?, a kiedy ju? kupiÅ'eÅ›, mo?esz jÄ… podrze?, bo do niczego innego siÄ™ nie przyda. Wszystko inne piszesz, ?eby coÅ› komuÅ› powiedzie?.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

The state might say that it had taken a year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold. What

Believe it or not, in 1969 the French writer Georges Perec wrote a palindromic story that was 500 words long! The whole story reads the same backwards as forwards.

The novel is part of that Western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India, thoughtful men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy what President Radhakrishnan calls 'the basic human hunger for the unseen'. It is not a good qualification for the writing and reading of novels.

I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.

Honestly, Mum, how can you say someone's a great writer if you've got a stack of reference books next to you? It's just showing off. If I behaved like that in front of other people, you'd totally tell me off when we got home. So.why is it alright for T. S. Eliot to swagger about like a complete know it all and make the rest of us feel stupid?

Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, Ernest Tidyman, John Le Carré, Norman Mailer, Penelope Fitzgerald and Colin Dexter all transported

But also, surprisingly, Charles Willeford, Ken Bruen and James Sallis.

We should call on the Creator to show more modesty. He created the world in a frenzy of excitement. Instead of revising his rough drafts, he had his work printed straightaway. What a lot of contradictions there are in it. What a log of typing errors, inconsistencies in the plot, passages that are too long and wordy, characters that are entirely superfluous. But it is painful and difficult to cut and trim the living cloth of a book written and published in too much of a hurry