Quotes About Writing

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

all the things I'd done in my life, of all the versions of myself I'd lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.

That you're so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you're here to do. And when people are here to do that, they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart. So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker. Yours,

I'd stopped being grandiose. I'd lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I'd-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book.

In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind.

I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.

When I have something to say that's particularly hard to say, I often write it down first.

The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young," she wrote. "When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother.

When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.

When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn't have written my book before I did. I simply wasn't capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties.

The reasons he could not continue with a book were usually the same: he would reach a particularly vivid image or a passage that threatened to pull him into another reality, and it frightened him, sometimes even into terror.

it is only when one writes a book that one realizes the true power of MSWord, from grammar checks to replace-alls.

He went to the board to write lots of Greek symbols and calculus equations. The course had started with cute little things like how people choose between tea and biscuits. It had moved on to scary equations that would dominate exams. The class took mad notes. Kanyashree wrote so hard I could feel the seismic vibrations from her pen's nib.

To give it all up and write, hoping to effect change in a country like India, sounded mad from the start. However, I knew that without a streak of madness I would never do this. The

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. E-mails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.

You can have my Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead, and lifeless hands.

You know you're a language nerd when you have a strong opinion about serial commas.

There's the Oxford comma, but I like the Shatner comma. It's when you pepper them in, so, you know where, to add, dramatic pauses.

Most writers have a cherished beat-up typewriter and a favorite well-maintained pen.

I feel so grateful to the man who invented the "Traveller's" typewriter...

Stories live in typewriters. Try a different typewriter — you may get a different story.

I've had secrets come out of my typewriter in invisible ink.

Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have countered a relative's latest example of unreasonableness.

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.