Quotes About Writing

Choice words in precise order bear power unmatched by amplified images and sound and technical magic (Writing for the Soul, p. 54).

The stuff that comes easy takes the most rewriting. And the stuff that comes hard reads the easiest (Writing for the Soul, p. 194).

Lady finger, dipped in moonlight, writing what for across the morning sky.

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.

Mr. Kosinski won the National Book Award for Steps

I write when I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time.

My head was just circling things, so I had to pull out all those squirming thoughts and nail 'em to the paper.

Imagine truth as a chain of great mountains, their tops way up in the clouds. Writers explore these truths, always looking out for new paths up these peaks.

And do you have opinions that John Locke didn't write first?

Dear Die-ary, I've been to heaven and hell...and I still don't know if there is a god or a devil. Still...it's something to write about.

I never killed anyone. I avoid going over that edge by writing about a guy who has taken a flying leap over it.

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The

It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself--rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.

If the process of writing is a dream, the book cover represents the awakening.

T]hey are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It's a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can't avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there.

Cammino sulla superficie, la parte accesibile. Ma so, da scrittrice, che una lingua esiste nelle ossa, nel midollo. Che la vera vita della lingua, la sostanza è lì.

We write books in a fixed moment in time, in a specific phase of our consciousness and development. That is why reading words written years ago feels alienating. You are no longer the person whose existence depended on the production of those words.

When I write in Italian, I think in Italian; to translate into English, I have to wake up another part of my brain. I don't like the sensation at all. I feel alienated. As if I'd run into a boyfriend I'd tired of, someone I'd left years earlier. He no longer appeals to me.

I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my student to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.

Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn.

Se fosse possibile colmare la distanza tra me e l'italiano, smetterei di scrivere in questa lingua.

Un libro, così come una persona, rimane qualcosa di imperfetto, di incompiuto, durante tutta la sua creazione. Alla fine della gestazione la persona nasce, poi cresce. Ma ritengo che un libro sia vivo solo mentre viene scritto. Dopo, al meno per me, muore.

How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine? That I don't know? Maybe because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language.