Quotes About Writing

This is why we desire so often to die, when we write, in order to see everything in a flash, and at least once shatter the spine of time with only one pencil stroke. — Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts . (Routledge November 12, 1998)

I would touch its walls with my fingers and its ceilings with my looks, I would invoke the powers of writing, I would bathe my soul in the rivers of unknown thoughts that genius unrolls when surrounded by the song of all the books its heart receives the marvelous measures of its own speech...

Écris, que nul ne ce retienne, que rien ne t'arrête : ni homme, ni imbécile machine capitaliste où les maisons d'édition sont les rusés et obséquieux relais des impératifs d'une économie qui fonctionne contre nous et sur notre dos ; ni toi-même.

And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying. — Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea . (University of Nebraska Press February 1, 1991) Originally published 1983.

My voice repels death; my death; your death; my voice is my other. I write and you are not dead. The other is safe if I write.

I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

La escritura daba la impresión que alejaba al hombre del conocimiento, que almacenaba sus recuerdos. También alejaba al orador del oyente, colocándolo a muchos kilómetros o años de distancia.

Education derives from the verb educe, which means "to draw forth from within." The original teaching method of Socrates has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority. By and large, our students are taught how to take exams but not to think, write, or find their own path.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

Sometimes I wish I were a character in a book and there was a writer out there giving me things to say.

Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day, said Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a great deal? I said. Two sentences, said Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. You've been seeking the mot juste? I said. No, said Joyce. I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.

Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

It is seriously believed by some that the intention may have been geodetic, or, in the view of the cannier, domestic economical. But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from tham Let Raise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?

She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impressarios?

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.

Somewhere, parently in the ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant the copyist must have fled the scroll.

He is a bold man who, in his writing, dares to alter---even further to distort---what he has seen and heard.

A pleased bottom. The turnstile. Is that? . . . Blueribboned hat . . . Idly writing . . . What? Looked? . . . The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius. Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling: John Eglinton, my jo, John. Why won't you wed a wife?