Quotes About Writing

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. (on Ernest Hemingway

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

If a story is in you, it has got to come out.

In writing, you must kill your darlings.

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.

If you write something that you love beyond all reason, it is wrong and you should strike it out.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

A novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.

I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi