Quotes About Writing

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn...

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start. (Interview, The Paris Review , Issue 64, Winter 1975)

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, What are my big scenes? and then get every drop of juice out of them. (Interview, The Paris Review , Issue 64, Winter 1975)

To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.

I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.

Mr Wooster, I am not ashamed to say that the tears came into my eyes as I listened to them. It amazes me that a man as young as you can have been able to plumb human nature so surely to its depths; to play with so unerring a hand on the quivering heart-strings of your reader; to write novels so true, so human, so moving, so vital! Oh, it's just a knack, I said.

There is nothing an author today has to guard himself more carefully against than the Saga Habit. The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him.

Writing my books I enjoy. It is the thinking them out that is apt to blot the sunshine from my life.

Tricky devils, these novelists. The ink gets into their heads.

P.G. Wodehouse

INTERVIEWER: Did you always know you would be a writer? WODEHOUSE: Yes, always. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

It is safest for the historian, if he values accuracy, to wait till a thing has happened before writing about it.

While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone.

Am I allowed to ask my book whether it's true I wrote it?

Y algo golpeaba en mi alma, fiebre o alas perdidas, y me fui haciendo solo, descifrando aquella quemadura y escribí la primera línea vaga, vaga, sin cuerpo, pura, tontería pura sabiduría del que no sabe nada, y vi de pronto el cielo desgranado y abierto.

Por qué me pican las pulgas y los sargentos literarios?