Quotes About Writing

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

The writer is all alone.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Mi innervosisco facilmente quando penso troppo, ma non voglio smettere di pensare. La mia testa è il solo posto dove non un soldato di Tsahal, non un tizio di Hamas, né mio padre né mia madre possono entrare. La mia testa è casa mia, l'unica casa che ho, troppo piccola per tutto quello che ci devo mettere ed è per questo che mi sono messo a scrivere.

It might not appear in the newspaper, it might not change anything or anyone else, but writing it would change the way she felt.

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

As against having beautiful workshops, studios, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

My primary motivation for writing is to communicate my perceptions and insights into the human condition, in a way that may provide understanding, comfort, and company to others.

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.

It was difficult for me to write, and not just because my hands were rough and my fingers so permanently bent around the handle of a pick and axe that unbending them was unbelievably difficult. I managed to wrap a thick rag around pen and pencil to give them the thickness of a pick or shovel handle.

Al lettore Questo libro non è un'opera di fantasia. È un colloquio dell'autore con suo fratello morto. L'autore, scrivendo, cercava consolazione, non altro. Egli ha il rimorso di avere appena intuita la spiritualità del fratello, e troppo tardi. Queste pagine si offrono quindi come una sterile espiazione.

Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left...

Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.

In school you learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost, A problem you were taught to solve not by writing clearly But by shackling your sentences and paragraphs together. Think about transitions. Remember how it goes? Late in the paragraph you prepare for the transition to the next paragraph— The great leap over the void, across that yawning indentation. You were taught the art of the flying trapeze, But not how to write.

Writing isn't a conveyer belt bearing the reader to "the point" at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.

We forget something fundamental as we read: Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn't. We can't see all the decisions that led to the final shape of the sentence. But we can see the residue of those decisions.

Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there will be room for implication.

But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.

using initial capitals for some words is a trait favoured by lunatics when writing letters to newspapers and celebrities. (As

That while I wanted to write with the narrative bravado of Toni Morrison, it might be okay if I started with something less ambitious than a book like beloved.