Quotes About Writing

The beginner will cling and cling to her thin first draft. She clings to the coast and will strike out into the ocean only under extreme duress

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork — reading, writing, thinking — can.

The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you.

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

writing those lines in his small kitchen, the light wet on the oilskin tablecloth, the night close against the window.

When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.

She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.

I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you're saying, someone who understands exactly what you're getting at. "Hmm," the typewriter says. And "Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see." And sometimes it chuckles....

A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It's where we live." So

Three creaks. She stepped three times. What is the meaning of it? Three creaks, three weeks? If she comes back for her shoes in three days, then I only need to empty them another three times. If it really is three weeks that were meant, what then. If three months, what then. Three years. That's why I had to write it down now. By then I may no longer believe I heard anything in Miri's room.

Society has been enabled by tireless contributions of labor and generous financial support provided by many individuals whose only compensation has been the satisfaction of fostering the circulation of this sacred writing in the world. Publication of this edition,

For the rest of us—members of that peculiar, prosaic species classified by Pierre Bourdieu as homo academicus9—dwelling poetically could mean gauging the dimensions of our own habits and mindfully inhabiting the rhythms of our writing lives: taking pride in a beautifully crafted sentence, lingering in the hallway for a friendly chat with a colleague, and working with our neighbors to rebuild our academic habitus into a place of possibilities.

Of all the myths surrounding academic writing, the fallacy of effortless productivity is among the most persistent.

All literature is scarry.

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out i did it and take my library card away.

Londres, por las cartas que escribí, ¡han colocado, en el emplazamiento de la librería, una placa de cobre con mi nombre! Sigo pensando que soy un escritora sin cultura ni demasiado talento, pero a pesar de todo ¡me han dedicado una placa en un muro de Londres.

Tell me," said Leo. "You've written a beautiful book. Why haven't we heard from you before? What was wrong with your earlier work? Too good or not good enough." "Not good enough," I said. And he nodded and went on to something else, and I think that's when we became soul mates.

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author." [As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website .]

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

The best antidote to writer's block is...to write.

What is the "it" in "write it down"? When you don't have an answer to that question, when you don't know what your goals are, you can use your writing to point you in the right direction. If you don't know what you want, start writing. Writing makes its own meaning

Writing separates the dream from the fear; writing about your anxiety makes it an entity existing outside of your goal.

I have written too much history to have faith in it and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

He had however one great advantage over both his Pilgrim and Puritan enemies, for he wrote a narrative of his adventures in a reckless and amusing fashion of which they were incapable, and thus has kept the laugh forever on his side.