Quotes About Writing

sister living in Canada. She is always writing to me

I am writing for myself and strangers.

Remarks are not literature [said to Hemingway].

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.

if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read.

I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.

La semplicità dev'esser tale che lo scrittore, o chiunque l'adopra in qualsivoglia caso, non si accorga, o mostri di non accorgersi di esser semplice, e molto meno di esser pregevole per questo capo. Egli dev'esser come inconsapevole non solo di tutte le altre bellezze dello scrivere, ma della stessa semplicità.

It feels amazing to work with writers that write really well.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?

In una vita così strema e consunta, la mia ambizione più urgente sarebbe quella di scrivere qualcosa che potesse intitolarsi, proprio letteralmente, De Amicitia. [...] Essere un amico concreto, non so se la mia vita potrà mai proporsi altri scopi. Aspirazione estrema, e chi sa se raggiungibile.

system that is paging is writing selected, infrequently used pages of memory to disk,

while a system that is swapping is writing entire processes from memory to disk.

Ogni tanto ti capita ancora, di pensare a quelle che potrebbero essere buone idee per dei racconti, o per dei romanzi. Ma passano via quasi subito, senza nemmeno che ti ponga più il problema di annotarle – e infatti non porti più il taccuino, da tanto tempo. Vanno via leggere, queste idee; senza più dolore, senza nemmeno tristezza. Giusto un'ombra di malinconia.

Nel discorso di accettazione del Nobel che ho già ricordato, Nadine Gordimer evoca una frase di Gabriel García Márquez: "Il modo migliore in cui uno scrittore può servire la rivoluzione è scrivere il meglio che può". Senza imbrogli, senza scorciatoie, dicendo la verità.

The best way to learn about a subject is to write a book about it." I

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Aristotle wrote that metaphor is the hallmark of genius.

There was something wrong; nobody else had to tell me. Writing it down made me see it. I'd told myself, as if writing to another person.

Despite the convent walls, when I was writing, my mind was free.

Large bodies of goal achievement research encourage written goals for good reason. When we write down our goals, we transform what we imagine into reality.

I knew I could always earn money from a job. What I didn't know was could I extend the dream of writing beyond my trip?