Quotes About Writing

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

I have often felt a motion of love to leave some hints in writing of my experience of the goodness of God, and now, in the thirty-sixth year of my age, I begin this work.

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

People say you make your best work when in despair, but I think happiness is a good place to write from.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.

Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The anxiety around such work [vulnerably written ethnographies] is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable.

The thing I do at the beginning is a "voice journal," a free form doc that is the character speaking to me. I just work on it until I start to hear different from my own, or the other characters.

The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.