Quotes About Writing

I'm no use to anybody,' I say. 'I'm a cérébrale, can't you see that?' Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming'. Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man. What a pity, what a pity!

The really important difficulty is the place, room, cave, cabin to write in. – Jean Rhys

If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.

I have a lot of writing to do and not as much time as you'd think. I do it at night now and look a bit haggard afterwards.

I thought I'd try to write her a life

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it's the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

I wrote my way out.

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. Fuck it, I thought, I can write my own.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.

The saggy armchair of clichés.

It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It's rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don't stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end.

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

This is one reason why it remains anarchic even at its most canonised. The modern world is Time's fool. Art is master of itself. But, you may say, who has long hours for a book these days? The answer must be whoever wants to read one. A reader must pick up a book, then the reader must pick up the beat. At that moment the clock is stopped. Now I am getting his beat into my brain (the rhythm is the main thing in writing).

I have ridden out all the storms," said Shakespeare, "even the ones I wrote myself. Here, look, it begins…

You don't have to get into writing – it's not like a pair of jeans... The only way to write is to write – the rest may or not follow.