Quotes About Writing

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

At last something important had occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone .

Any act of writing is an act of empathy: you try to imagine yourself into another person's mind and skin. I tried to ask myself the questions the characters would have asked themselves. The

Tarih yaz?c?l??? özgürle?tirmiyorsa zulme hizmet ediyordur

Gli uomini che hanno una tempestosa vita interiore e non cercano sfogo nei discorsi o nella scrittura sono semplicemente uomini che non hanno una tempestosa vita interiore.

E scriverò per te, per il tuo ricordo straziante, pochi versi dolenti che tu non leggerai più. Ma a me staranno atroci, inchiodati nel cuore per sempre.»

It's the story of how I went from being lionized for helping bring the snipers to justice to being vilified for writing a book about it.

To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.

Nabokov once said that the price of being a writer was sleepless nights. But, Nabokov added slyly, if the writer doesn't have sleepless nights, how can he hope to cause sleepless nights in anyone else?

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

When I lay down the pen the taper of life will expire: my existence will terminate my tale.

The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.

life is a bad reason for including a character in a story.

THE PRINCIPAL REASON WE SHOULD ALL ARTICULATE OUR LONG-TERM investment policies explicitly and in writing is to protect our portfolios from ourselves.

The writer dreams awake. The killer nightmares awake. (L'écrivain rêve éveillé. Le tueur cauchemarde éveillé)

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

She'll wish there was more, and that's the great art o' letter-writin'.

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art." (Last words, according to Dickens's obituary in The Times .)

There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.

I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.