Quotes About Writing

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory… He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.

I'm a lousy writer; a helluva lot of people have got lousy taste.

Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.

The whole meaning of my life, which was jammed until midnight with fifteen different jobs and places, was writing. It took me a long time to know that, but I know it now.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.

I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

Certos escritores se desculpam de não haverem forjado coisas excelentes por falta de liberdade -- talvez ingênuo recurso de justificar inépcia ou preguiça. Liberdade completa ninguém desfruta: começamos oprimidos pela sintaxe e acabamos às voltas com a Delegacia de Ordem Política e Social, mas, nos estreitos limites a que nos coagem a gramática e a lei, ainda nos podemos mexer

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

ALLEGORY IS STILL a contentious aspect of gay writing. To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is 'appropriation' or 'prurience'. Associating it with something in one's own love life is either 'conscripting a writer for the cause' (gay) or 'demonstrating its universal relevance' (straight).

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.

Writing well is one of the most crucial tools of the modern person. It is a skill required by nearly every profession, and one that allows you to get your work done, help others, and leave behind a legacy of your thoughts and actions so you may be remembered long after you are gone.

There are two authors of every biblical book: the human author who penned the words, and the divine Author who revealed and inspired every word. While God did not dictate the words to the biblical writers, he did guide their minds so that they wrote their own words under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

Ray Bradbury is, for many reasons, the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship, Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be, should be, and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible, willing to tolerate and to teach, happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

It proved a wet, ungenial summer," the future Mary Shelley wrote, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." To entertain themselves, they wrote ghost stories. Mary Shelley's would become Frankenstein.

Rejected pieces aren't failure; unwritten pieces are.

12Having many things to write to you, I did not wish to do so with paper and ink; but I hope to come to you and speak face to face, that our joy may be full.