Quotes About Writing

despite the absence of a real state monopoly on violence, early states were much more formidable structures than chiefdoms. And everywhere they appear, they are associated with the same cluster of features. These include new forms of specialization and an extensive division of labor, bureaucracies, systems of accounting and writing, armies, and fiscal systems.

Simplicity and concision are tough. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted that he'd written a long letter, having lacked the time required to write a shorter one.2 As I believe, if you can't convey a thought clearly and in a few words, then your comprehension of it is probably lacking.

If you don't have calluses on your soul, writing isn't for you. Take up knitting instead.

Writers change the world one heart, one mind, at a time. That should be enough to keep us going.

the wisest writers, those who become most popular, learn to draw upon art and literature in order to create works that speak to audiences more strongly, more deeply, and appeal to a wider network of readers.

Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it's easier.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across this room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich and complicated and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not a good writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life - that's our opening, and that's' our gift.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

Authors are monkeys who mean

The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write — every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.

That's why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They're not saying effortless in terms of it didn't seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you're bored, you're conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.

David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously

Not even the masters of the high/low rhetorical register go higher more panoramically or lower more exuberantly than Wallace—not Joyce, not Bellow, not Amis.

Basically what you're doing when you're writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we're willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe.

Creative Writing Programs, while claiming in all good faith to train professional writers, in reality train more teachers of Creative Writing. The only thing a Master of Fine Arts degree actually qualifies one to do is teach… Fine Arts. - from Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

We need an inflation-generative grammar.

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don't have that in their lives make it through the day.

A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous object.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.