Quotes About Writing

Never walk over a writer, I said to myself, unless you're positive he can't rise up behind you. If you're going to burn him, make sure he's dead. Because if he's alive, he will talk: talk in written form, on the printed, permanent page.

They know a million tricks, those novelists.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Phoenicians pioneered a new style of writing that reproduced not images of the things described but the sounds used for them in speech--the first alphabetic script, As trade developed, writing became more common, for clay tablets had been replaced by an Egyptian technology: papyrus. The thinner more flexible material, made from the pith of reeds growing along the Nile, is the ancestor of the English word 'paper' (now being replaced by The Tablet).

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

There is time, and there is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

in writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor...

I'm working on another Lyra book right now – it's called The Book of Dust. "It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'.

The question authors get asked more than any other is Where do you get your ideas from? And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.

It's important to put it like that: not "I am a writer," but rather "I write stories." If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

By the light of a candle, he composed a letter, saying everything as briefly as possible:

When I'm writing, I'm more conscious of the sound, actually, than the meaning. I know what the rhythm of the sentence is going to be before I know what the words are going to be in it.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo en entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.