Quotes About Writing

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

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

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time." He went on: "I can't face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can't do that anymore. --New York Times, 18 Nov. 2012

I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it.

Writing is) the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act (in both senses of that word).

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing. Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on.

You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman. Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

All of this was why, from Quahsay, I had mailed my four published stories to Lonoff. Felix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son.

Writing isn't hard work, it's a nightmare. Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare. . . There's a tremendous uncertainty that's built into the profession, a sustained level of doubt that supports you in some way. A good doctor isn't in a battle with his work. In most professions there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. With writing, it's always beginning again.

Scrivere ti trasforma in una persona che sbaglia sempre. La perversione che ti spinge a continuare è l'illusione che un giorno, forse, l'imbroccherai. Che cos'altro potrebbe farlo? Come per tutti i fenomeni patologici, non ti rovina completamente la vita.

Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went.

Helping them eliminate the error involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you're trying to argue for.

He told me he wants to write this book arguing that Christianity is the universe's way of punishing itself, that what Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.

This kind of fiction doesn't interest me.

Formal writing does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clear, clean, maximally considerate writing.

The more your copy sounds like a real conversation, the more engaging it will be.

1. Headline 2. Open – Promise or Negative Optism (See Chapter 9) 3. Credentials 4. Offer 5. Bullets 6. Choice of one 7. Price 8. Guarantee 9. Takeaway 10. Signature 11. P.S.

The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

I can type very fast, sometimes even faster than I can think of what to type.

Well, I think it's extraordinarily fun to write, and I look forward to it every day, but that doesn't mean I think it's easy. There's a difference between the two. It's fun in the way all worthwhile things are fun – there's difficulty attached to it. I think that a writer has to accept a certain amount of frustration. It's inherent in the task, and you have to simply persevere. It's part of the definition of the work.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.