Quotes About Writing

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes." Philip Dusenberry

As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.

I wish Barry Lopez would write novels. from Conversations with Jim Harrison

Just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch." —Jim Harrison

When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.

I'll always be a word man, better than a bird man

The writer is just answering a series of unuttered questions.

That to me is the way any good romantic would look at his life: Live it first, then write it down before you go.

But she did have to do something creative, even if it was just some little thing, because she was not writing, and not writing is hard work, almost as hard as writing.

Jenny Marzen is who again? Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. And Jenny is my number one fan? No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school. What is she, twelve? The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you've got gravitas. That's a dirty lie. I never even had mono.

It's more common for the students I've worked with to read too much than to read too little. They use reading as a distraction, or as a way to avoid having to think their own thoughts, or as a magic charm: "If I read everything in the field, then I'll be able to write and be sure I haven't missed anything.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

We write to discover what we think.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn't think. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.