Quotes About Writing

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.

Our chief marketable skill, coming out of college, is the ability to write authoritatively about things we don't necessarily understand.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

You can put suspenders on a salamander, but it still won't make waffles. See what I mean? That sentence makes absolutely no sense, but I got paid to write it. It's printed right here in a published book!

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.

Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

Here is a drawing of a stapler:

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page. So you have to do it, goddamnit.

the observer is, more often than not, passive. writing chiefly about his or her surroundings, and the people he or she meets. The writer reacts, instead of acts. Well, i suppose they [travel writers] do act, in that they have to do the traveling, choose the destinations, and so forth, but again, largely they are observant cargo, being shuttled from place to place with notebook in hand.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. —Nadia Boulanger It's

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. —Nadia Boulanger

The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory. If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all. The only rewriting should be for changed appointments.

He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants [...], which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person.

Not really. All you have to do is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

Energy is my specialty and I do white papers and briefing documents and I help write speeches for the administration

She talked to herself as she wrote. Dark hair, about six four five, two-forty. Shoulders the size of Nebraska. Amazing blue eyes. She put down her pen. Amazing blue eyes?Where did that come from?

since a pen or pencil could easily be turned

She had spent considerable time writing the letter. The younger generation, with all of its tweets and Facebook and cryptic texts and emails where no actual language or grammar were involved, would never have understood taking the time

David Baldacci

My mom said you always write thank-you letters, and besides, I wanted to.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave . . . an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth.

It wasn't that I wanted to be a writer; I just didn't want to be stupid.