Quotes About Writing

All I manage to glimpse is an effect of melting light on one side of her misty hair, and in this, I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one's imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company's pictorial advertisement.

I not only debar too definite a planet from any role in my story – from the role every dot and full stop should play in my story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart).

Every great writer is a great deceiver

I love you. Infinitely and inexpressibly. I've woken up in the middle of the night and here I am writing this. My love, my happiness.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

The prerequisite for writing is having something to say.

If my mom reads that I'm grammatically incorrect I'll have hell to pay.

Traditional grammar

If you've ever wondered why some writers who, in your humble opinion, don't write as well as you do yet are rich and famous while you struggle onward, this is the reason. They are great directors.

Writing voice isn't as much a function of thinking as it is something that eludes definition and therefore assimilation.  The more artful flavors of prose are more often a function of intuition and imitation fused with heart and wit and delivered with a strong does of lyric sensibility. It

Doing a lot of reading is not the prerequisite to writing.

Here's the truth about organic writing: It's just story planning by another name.

I have chosen this thing to do, away from my family, the doors closed, characters who form in my head and move to the paper, black symbols on a white sheet, no more than that.

If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.

There are times when I'm driving home after a day's shooting, thinking to myself, That scene would've been so much better if I had written it out.

Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page, then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.

Professional writers don't have muses; they have mortgages.

Don't utilize utilize. Use use.

While he fucked the Slave, hoping all the while that Master would watch only and not give vent, Fred attempted to remember his decisions: Had he not decided to write about a Voyage of Discovery into this World in which he lived? This Faggot World.

twould appear that if Fred Lemish spent half as much time writing as he did hoping Dinky Adams would say "I love you," he'd have a ten-foot shelf. And if Dinky Adams spent half as much time legitimately planting and fertilizing as he did scattering his seeds to the winds, he'd be New York's leading gardener. Though, of course, as we shall continue to see, he already is.

I set out to make sense of my life. And I found out that one's life, particularly after one has written about it, doesn't make sense. Life doesn't make sense.

Walter Benjamin writes: The talent of a good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not. . . to his own benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he wants to say.

Although God and His promise of a better life hereafter may have been dismissed by Kramer as just another false comfort, the muscular directness of his writing, its spontaneous spoken-ness, its proud discomfort, its inelegant elegance, are Jewish tropes.

And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it?" Mrs Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.