Quotes About Writing

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours; there is no life without them.

Because the worst literature, my father would say, is always written with the best intentions

I told him, for instance, how I had come to experience time differently. The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited. He

I had come to experience time differently. The world I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited.

My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.

All of that pile on you so that, sooner or later, you cannot bear it anymore. And in that situation I started to write, because there was no other ways for me to express, except through the vicious cycle of words.

Olha como chora, alguma coisa nele extravasou. Pensei muitas vezes nesta frase. Depois, escrevi-a numa folha em branco. Voltei a riscar, voltei a escrever. Quando a folha encheu, rasguei-a do caderno. A isto chama-se memória.

Das Schreiben zähmt das Gelebte.

Heywood Broun

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

It was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world.

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry

When you're writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untold story. You're looking for what has been repressed politically, or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

I do no damage. This is damage, this." He picked up a paper from Camille's desk. "I can't read your writing, but I take it the general tenor is that Brissot should go and hang himself.

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit— bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.