Quotes About Writing

I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.

I've spent my life writing and now I'm writing about my life." HANNAH COLLINS - AUTHOR

He lik'd those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces, By plucking bon-mots from their places...

My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.

Anne really liked chatting and gossiping. That's the same with me. Then I like reading and writing.

I was once again gripped by the old familiar passion; I wrote without looking up, nor did I look round either - neither to the left, nor to the right.

The first concern must, then, not be to speak as others speak, but to conceive of the word of truth with understanding and exactitude. . . . It is not a matter of refuting the opinions of others, but of presenting one's own; not a matter of contesting some aspect of the teaching or behavior of others that seems not to be good, but of writing on behalf of truth.59

Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.

I can write pretty much anywhere if you give me time and some quiet. The home is not usually the best place because I have four children. It's usually pandemonium around here!

If I'm not writing well, I'm not happy. If I'm not spending enough time with my family, I'm not happy. If I'm not connecting to friends or if I don't work out enough... You get the point. Everything has to be balanced. Nothing should be an extreme.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.

It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

It was his own miscegenation--his sensual enjoyment of a dark forbidden culture and his own forbidden longings and love--that dovetailed in his writings.

The Anxiety of Influence

I would have written something shorter, but I didn't have time.

The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.

There would be nights when I would wake up and couldn't get back to sleep. So I would go downstairs and write. The staff had a pool going on how many pages of typing I would bring in here in the morning.

John Hay calls the telegraph reporter, "the natural enemy of the scribe.

Looking to advance in journalism, one future editor displayed skilled as varied as economic analysis and humorous commentary.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.