Quotes About Writing

Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Petrarch writes, "between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed toward death. We are always dying—I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Trust your reader, stop patronising your reader, give your reader credit for being smart as you at least.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

In a way, the goal of all writing projects should be to "get the hell out." You don't simply want to finish; you want to finish as quickly and easily as possible (without undue stress or pressure, of course) so that you can move on to the next project—or, the rest of your life.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

longing to trust someone; I was making life a fiction, or writing

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.

He liked the way the story unfolded as he wrote, liked the way the answers just came to him sometimes, out of the blue, like they were true things just waiting to be discovered by him.

He remembered her with ink-stained fingers and a messy apartment full of paperbacks.

I think of the note I found, of the press of his nibbed pen hard enough to send flecks of ink spattering as he wrote my name. Hard enough to dig through the page, maybe to scar the desk beneath. If that's what he did to the paper, I shudder to think what he wants to do to me.

Write with joy

The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.

Just make sure the unknown is a place you the writer understand. If you're going to write, you have to love. ... You have to fall on your face, swim against the tide, make terrible mistakes, and pay the price; you have to tune in, turn on, drop out, drop back in, fight, cry, lose, win. ... Above all, don't get too comfortable. Go out there and get your heart broken. You won't be able to write until you do.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.

it is evident that historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs, exactly as most of the newspapers of the day express nothing but the opinions of their readers.

Writers kid themselves -- about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work -- there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes -- it's still just work.

I have spent myself on all kinds of things I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.