Quotes About Writing

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

A writer needs to read almost more than his eyes can bear, to know what is going, & what has gone on.... And a writer needs general knowledge. And a writer needs to write. And a writer needs to live richly with eyes open, & heart, too." —

Writing is a delicious agony.

Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

I aim to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time, work out where we've been going wrong (and why), and come up with some tips and tricks to help show how, in future, we can make fewer (rather than 'less') mistakes. All right? Is 'alright' all right? You'll find out right here.

If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don't need to add another full stop: He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless.

Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.

The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of a gaze, with the skin of our hands.

Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.

This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores.

The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. "The thing" does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country. The writer has a foreign origin; we do not know the particular nature of these foreigners, but we feel they feel there is an appeal, that someone is calling them back.

Those I love go in the direction of what they call the last hour—what Clarice Lispector calls, "the hour of the star," "the hour of relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live. Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of our two needs: our need for love and cowardice.

The author of what I describe is not myself, it is the Other. First of all it is you, it is the woman, it is the queen, it is the Child, it is a person who is greater than I and who surpasses you as well, whom you do not know. I am your scribe.

When I write, all those that we don't know we can be write themselves from me, without exclusion, without prediction, and everything that we will be calls us to the tireless, intoxicating, tender-costly-search for love. We will never lack ourselves.

This book is my obliging you. This is a book I never would have dared write, if I did not feel protected and obligated by your madness.

for a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes--because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare.

But I may also be afraid. I am afraid. I have already read it. And, not to lie to you, I liked it. But I am afraid. I am not afraid of you, Fidelia, Sania, Ania. I am afraid of you . (I put all this in my separate notebook. My doubtbook.)

I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be found here of man; it's up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.

And why don't you write?Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven). Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great - that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly". Besides, you've written a little, but in secret.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.

One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward dark.

Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.

I write, I extend my hand; without my knowing it, this is already a prayer, I extend my hand to you so that you will exist because you do exist, beyond my fingers, your fingers, without my knowing it this is already a response, already I draw to my side the site for you, with one hand I call the other hand, it is in this modest, all-powerful way that I begin to save what is lost. When I write I ask for your hand.

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.