Quotes About Writing

It's absurd that having started writing rules at fifteen, I should still be writing them at thirty, without having trusted in, or followed a single one, but still for some reason believing in them and wanting them.

After reading Tolstoy's lengthy essay "On Life" in 1889, Ernest Crosby, a thirty-three-year-old American diplomat who was working in Egypt at the time, decided that diplomacy wasn't his calling and instead dedicated the next twenty-seven years of his life to writing and lecturing about Tolstoy throughout the United States.

My method of writing is to take the most basic kind of line and improvise on it. After all, I am the child of the culture which created Jazz.

Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.

Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you don't have it, don't become a writer

I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.

Too many writers start with a good idea and carry it through the first chapters, then fall apart because they had no idea where the top of the mountain was in the first place.

Anyone who goes into writing has to find out somewhere along the line, he's either naïve or insane.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others it's for others to use.

My page was too white My ink was too thin The day wouldn't write What the night pencilled in

It's four in the morning, the end of december I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.

I didn't kill myself when things went wrong I didn't turn to drugs or teaching I tried to sleep but when I couldn't sleep I learned to write I learned to write what might be read on nights like this by one like me

I write to murder the selves that whisper untruths to me.

I'm blackening pages, but I don't know if it's writing.

Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.

So many writers make dope glamorous; a form of romantic transgression, or world-weariness, or poetic sensitivity, or hipness. Mainly it's the stuff of ritualistic communion among inarticulate bores.

Good writing is like music. It has its distinctive rhythm, its pace, flow, cadence. It can be hummed. The great stylists seem to have an inner music...

nulla è più delizioso per uno scrittore del divagare, dell'estravagare: lo scrivere sembra diventare pura, trasparente esistenza - notiamo di quanto profitto siano per la letteratura i miti e le cronache dei gemelli, dei sosia, delle usurpazioni e/o contestazioni di identità, delle sostituzioni notturne e degli sdoppiamenti o dimezzamenti tipo Jekyll-Hyde.

How could I write this when I don't even dare think about it? I am terribly anguished, yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory...I know that once this has been written down, I shall be delivered. You must know, otherwise I shall be persecuted to the end of my living days. But shall I be able to express with mere words the horror of that day?

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can't keep track of them.

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

By being yourself on the page, you'll more than likely attract more readers because of your individuality than you would by hiding your personality behind a neutral style.

but majoring in creative writing only ever helped me to write a lot in my diary.