Quotes About Writing

If I still adhered to perfect work, I never would have written this imperfect book, which for the last decade or so has changed lives across the globe.

Brian's Law. The longer you wait to write a thank-you note, the longer it must be.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

Não sou daqueles que planejam acuradamente cada vírgula que escrevem e cada sopro de ar que exalam, de modo que a história, isto é, os idiotas de amanhã possam admirar sua perfeição.

Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.

When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, I went there---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- and it wasn't like that. I say, Because I am not you.

I cannot think of any writer of stature in English who has not shown a knowledge of the Bible.

Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing - groping around in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness.

You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.

I believe in every possible manifestation of spiritual strangeness. I believe in all possible escapes. The only thing I cannot endure is reality, whatever it may be. I believe that the writer is defined by the constant necessity of creating a world, to depart from this world. Literature is more concerned with misery than with happiness. Writing is directly related to frustration. It is a reflection of personal desperation. The writer is profoundly disgusted with his reality.

Don't write," he said, seeing me scribbling into my notebook, taking me for a journalist.

Don't write," he said, seeing me scribbling into my notebook, taking me for a journalist. "Periodista?" Diego asked. "Pensionado," I said. Retiree.

Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

I'm a writer, I said. I like long stories.

The travel, the sex, the writing, the romances, were—so Norman Sherry suggests—all attempts by Greene to relieve his depression. He was an authentic melancholic.

This mention of Juan Villoro was fortuitous. He is one of Mexico's most illustrious writers, a

And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.

D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and Aldous Huxley—all visitors, inspired in their writing by their immersion in Oaxaca—would recognize

The writing profession that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid.

Claudia Muzzi, of Italian ancestry, had traveled in Italy and indeed spoke Italian. But her most memorable experiences had been in the United States, specifically in Georgia. She planned to write about it later in the week.