Quotes About Writing

Sid had a cerebral band of writers, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Mike Stuart, Shelly Keller, Neil Simon, not to mention contributors like Carl Reiner, Howie Morris, and Sid himself.

Hay un desprendimiento liberador en el acto de romper las hojas que uno ha escrito, acaso por haber notado en ellas la desnudez obscena de un par de sentimientos. Existe una soberbia mojigata remojada en pudores melancólicos detrás de la sospecha de que cuanto escribimos hace pocas semanas nos hace ver como unos cursis infumables: pornógrafos del sentimiento.

Siempre creyó que un novelista debe estar a la altura de sus historias, y desde siempre le aquejó el temor de nunca ser lo suficientemente bravo

I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out.

I don't know then. I wrote my book on the Holocaust without worrying about where the fucking bar code would go.

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative's latest example of unreasonableness.

De alguna manera, entre ellos descubrieron cómo cortar la grasa sin sacrificar nada del sabor de mi prosa.

It is true that a writer writes first to please himself and that his own satisfaction with what he has done is perhaps his greatest satisfaction. But writing is a means of communication. It is not enough to speak; you must also be heard. The message must be received and understood.

Most of us have small, sad places somewhere in our hearts and my father was no exception. Sometimes we let our feelings escape in bursts of anger. Sometimes we make long, dismal faces. My father did neither. He felt deeply but he kept his feelings to himself. Or rather, being a writer, he let them escape in his writing. But even here he disguised them, unable even in fiction to allow himself to take himself too seriously.

If you haven't the creative urge, or if it is fulfilled elsehow, then, although you may be a skilled craftsman, writing the most delightful letters to your friends, the most lucid reports to your superiors, you will never produce a poem or a play or a story. You may make a journalist but you will never make an author.

I have always suffered from the feeling that it's better to read a good book than to write a poor one; and I've done so much mixed reading in my time that my mind is full of echoes and voices of better men. But this book I'm worrying about now really deserves to be written, I think, for it has a message of its own.

La notte ha una mistica affinità con la letteratura.

I'm too old-fashioned to use a computer. I'm too old-fashioned to use a quill.

I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.

Awake before the sun is risen, I call for my pen and papers and desk.

When you "spell" a word correctly, you are in effect casting a spell, charging these abstract, arbitrary symbols with meaning and power.

I can't understand why you're writing scripts for Bugs Bunny," the old lady replied with some asperity. "He's funny enough just as he is.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.