Quotes About Writing

These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.

It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.

it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.

Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking.

run off—and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper—black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal

I am always disgusted by the world. The more that time passes the more I become increasingly broody and tight-lipped. I have so many things in mind and so much that I plan to do that an entire human lifetime is barely enough for me to finish everything I'm thinking, and to set it down in writing. That's why I have an absolute need for countryside, quiet, solitude.

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory.

Note how patronized you feel as a reader. Does this writer think we're in third grade? Does he think his points are that hard to grasp?

Everything is copy.

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

I have been forgetting things for years—at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.

I think the hardest thing about writing is writing. [Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]

I think you often have that sense when you write-that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

There were cats; cats I was wildly attached to — my husband and I spoke in cat voices. Once the marriage was over, I never thought of the cats again (until I wrote about them in a novel and disguised them as hamsters).

On it I read most of Anthony Trollope and all of Edith Wharton, both of whom are dead and can't be written to. Too bad; I'd like to tell them their books are as contemporary as they were when they were written.

Terminé el guion y la película se hizo. Aprendo enseguida de la experiencia, y la lección que aprendí en este caso fue que había tenido muchísima suerte de no heredar una suma importante de dinero, porque no habría terminado de escribir Cuando Harry encontró a Sally, una película que cambió mi vida. Cuando Harry

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

I had always zipped through that part of the speech as if I had somehow managed to be invulnerable to the fantasy, as if I had somehow managed to escape from or rise above it simply as a result of having figured it out. I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

I didn't get fired. You didn't punch your boss and get fired from the Tribune? That's what I heard. I punched what could loosely be called a colleague for cribbing my notes on a story and since the editor–who happened to be the asshole's uncle–took his word over mine, I quit. To write books. Is it fun? I guess it is. I bet you killed the asshole in the first one you wrote. You'd be right. Beat him to death with a shovel. Very satisfying.

As a rule of thumb, I'd say one cliché per [Romance]--and then be damn sure you can make it work. But if you're going to try to write the virginal amnesiac twin disguised as a boy mistaken for the mother (or father depending how well the disguise works) of a secret baby, honey, you better have some serious skills. Or seek therapy.

I need to write to be happy.