Quotes About Writing

There are lots of variations on the path to self-publishing; this is the one Kamal and I have both used. WRITE THE BOOK.

1) Read two hours a day. 2) Write ten ideas a day. By the end of a year, you will have read for almost one thousand hours and written down 3,600 ideas.

The ideas have to be so good that it's possible they have never thought of them before. I write, let it sit, rewrite, let other people look at them sometimes, and finally send.

Raymond Chandler's first novel came out at 51.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.

One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

I don't know any writers who don't drink.

For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.

The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.

It had not really been written to make money—if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.

You've come full circle. Here you are again, with it all to do all over again, and you must decide all over again whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is." —

Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Simplicity is king. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. (in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

As your experience about writing accrues) you learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had.

Writing for me must be a very controlled exercise, formed by passions and hopes.