Quotes About Writing

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

Write, write, & write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

The Baba gives me paper, and a pen that sputters ink. Write, she says, tell the true Though you may have to lie to do it.

I learned to write poetry, telling the truth through metaphor, simile, straight-forward lies.

You want to tell this story, perhaps now you will.

We don't usually write up accidents involving rabbits. - Joe Morelli

I don't get writer's block because I don't believe in it. I believe you sit in front of the computer and force your fingers to get something on the screen.

You're his what?" "Amanuensis.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

It's their skins I'm peeling, she said. The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind

there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

The subject of a piece of writing has not suffered the tension and anxiety endured by the subject of the Eichmann experiment (as it has been called) - on the contrary, he has been on a sort of narcissist's holiday during the period of interviews - but when the moment of peripeteia comes, he is confronted with the same mortifying spectacle of himself flunking a test of character he did not know he was taking.

Nouns and verbs hold the power but syntax casts the spell.

No one sets out to write escapism as a film's subject matter unless, maybe, you are making a fantasy flick.

I can't write unless I've got the voice for a character.

One thing that's nice about writing a book about food is - unless it's from a specific place - you can revisit things easily by preparing the dish. The sensory detail that comes from interacting with that is something that can be recreated pretty easily.

I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'

Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.

Unlike a lot of writers, I don't have any craving to be understood.