Quotes About Writing

Making the journal equal to the journey is simply a matter of shifting your intention: you're no longer traveling and keeping a log on the side, but embarking with a dual purpose.

It's the same with writer's block—a surefire way to break the spell is to begin writing furiously, about anything.

journal; it's a deeply intimate affair and by far the most private of all writing projects, and no one can or should tell you exactly how to approach it. That would be like advising you on how to bathe or pray—it's really your own deal. I do, however, know what works for me and for lots of other writers, and I have ideas to share.

Procrastination hurts almost any project, but it's murder on a travel journal. First

As Barbara Kingsolver said, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Think long thoughts in short sentences.

But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. –

If my writing produces angry reactions, then it might also effect a more balanced reflection. These are hard times to get it right, but the easy answers to yesterday's debate won't get it right.

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

what he [the science fiction writer) wishes to capture on paper is different from writers in other fields.... There is no actual boyhood world once extant but now only a moment, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds... . PHILIP K. DICK, 1980

I just wrote a book. But don't go and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished.

Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher.