Quotes About Writing

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

The most durable thing in writing is style. It is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

But this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down. A gag, I said. An old, old gag. Who is this Hemingway person at all? A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good. That must take a hell of a long time, the big man said.

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." ? Raymond Chandler

Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.

Hemingway dice en alguna parte que el buen escritor compite únicamente con los muertos.

Intentan ser honestos, pero la honestidad es un arte. El mal escritor es deshonesto sin saberlo, y el escritor más o menos bueno puede que sea deshonesto porque no sabe sobre qué ser honesto.

When it's good it comes easy. Anything you have read or heard to the contrary is a lot of mishmash.

The only salvation for a writer is to write. If there is anything good in him, it will come out.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her . . . that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

My ancestors were conquerors, though now they are heroes in our history. Glancing at Amos, he said, But we wrote the history.

C'est en écrivant qu'on devient écriveron

The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it's the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.