Quotes About Writing

dyer. (Looking at him scornfully) So that is why Wits swarm like Egypt's Frogs. If I were a Writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy or familiar. I would chuse a huge lushious Style! vannbrugghe. (Interrupting) Ah the music of Erudition, it is unimaginable to weaker Wits. dyer. (Ignoring him) I would imploy outlandish Phrases and fantasti-call Terms, thus to restore Terrour, Reverence and Desire like wild Lightning.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.

The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

But if one can lock the door, disconnect the telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a "zero draft"—the one before the first draft. From then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.

Cotton Mather lusted all his life for the presidency of Harvard, a post his father had held, and which the son affected to despise, especially after others were chosen; he was a prig and a meddler; an unscrupulous ideologue and a windy orator; a scribbler who praised simplicity in flowery circumlocutions, so anxious to see his production in print that it might be said of him, with little fear of exaggeration, that he would rather lose his soul than misplace a manuscript.

escribiendo por completo cada palabra, incluso los números, para alargar lo más posible el proceso de escribir, en el que se sentía seguro. (pág 53)

Ein Schriftsteller oder überhaupt jemand, der mit dem Alleinsein fertig geworden wäre, würde mich nicht mehr interessieren

used to write her books.

I think writers have to able to enjoy solitude rather than just endure it. I've always enjoyed being left alone with my imagination, ever since I was a kid

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

Holy shit! That's a vampire. He's writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump.

Another writer once asked me why I wrote about "nebbishes." I told him I wanted to write about "the common man.") Sometimes I even

I don't shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.

But you write what comes back to you, and then afterward it comes back to you all over again.

Nevertheless, in every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.

I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions.

Almost all the proofreading editors I've encountered seem to have gone to a college where there's a class listed in the catalog as "How To Put Commas In The Wrong Place And The Writer In A Coma.

We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.

I like commas.

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, woman as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn't just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.' Jean Baudrillard