Quotes About Writing

Picture writing, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics? Very similar. What we might call an illustrated comic strip. Only without the panels. The panels were never fully deciphered.

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ( Casual Chance , 1964)

He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times--amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being published; what once they'd done for fun ruined forever by the burden of expectation, the hope of sales and good reviews and riches, hobbyists turned authors made bitter by the knowledge that they'd missed their main chance.

I never write purely for the fun of it. I write as a mathematician uses a sheet of paper for doing calculations: because I think better that way

The first one hundred pages were fueled by early Misfits ("Where Eagles Dare [fast version]," "Horror Business," "Hybrid Moments") and Blanck Mass ("Dead Format"). David Bowie is in every book, and I always put on Purple Rain and Daydream Nation when I write the final pages; so thanks to him and Prince and Sonic Youth.

I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep 'write what you know'—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world's indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

A brand-new thought: Transatlantic airmail. She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, transatlantic, trans atlas, trans antic. The distance finally broken.

He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted—it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his fingers

He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted—it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his finge

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life's task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway, the diary, the Curriculum.

when I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated.1 Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

El verdadero peligro de un ensayo de esta índole no radica en que se detecte un enfoque personal, sino en que se escriba con un tinte tendencioso.

I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.