Quotes About Writing

Ultimately one has to pity these poor souls who know every secret about writing, directing, designing, producing, and acting but are stuck in those miserable day jobs writing reviews. Will somebody help them, please?

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

ineffable , adj . these words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations words cannot convoy. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

I want to write my life. I want to be able to write my life. You are a second away from saying it. You have no idea how much I love you.

The words just start to fall there. And I feel some satisfaction from that. I've never written just for myself. And I've never written for anyone else. I write for the release of it. For finding out what will be there when I am done.

I wasn't as good at semi-normal conversation as I was at ones that were written down, or adrenalized in a surreal moment.

Some days I'm up for the challenge. Some days I need to catch my breath. But it's a long story we're writing. Even on the days when it's hard, I know that someday it will be better.

The handwriting was a girl's. I mean, you can tell. That enchanted cursive.

It's just extraordinary to me that the story I write in relative isolation can then connect with so many people, and that the meaning I put into it somehow translates into meaning for a reader. I don't think you can ever expect that.

I didn't write autobiography. I wrote to leave autobiography behind.

He asked me if I wrote, and I told him the truth - that I was still observing, and hadn't yet found the words.

I'm not sure we're any better, but able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

Writers are asked, 'How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?' The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.

People who write novels only write them when they have very little else to write

Ese material se te ocurre cuando estás borracho? Preguntó un primo de Faulkner.

Uno no termina un poema, simplemente lo abandona.

Even if I had not been thinking about it, for that matter, certainly I would have had to begin to do so when I typed those last few sentences.

don't expect a magic formula that'll make books fall out of your head and automatically give you a wide readership.

When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the subalterns, the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.

Writing comes out of the rift between what we have experienced and the language we've been given to express it. We write to bridge this divide, to find word adequate to our sense of reality... Creative writing is the search for and creation of a language that will express what the writer unconsciously knows but does not yet have a language to express.

For now, if you are a white writer writing about a character of color, here is one consideration: Do you have friends or colleagues of that race who would openly and freely tell you if you are failing in that task and how and why, and would you be willing to seriously consider their critiques?

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious. Actual formal considerations are almost beyond my capacity. Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.

I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.