Quotes About Writing

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.

Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

Cuando una novela nos da menos de lo que muchos de nosotros sabemos, nos hallamos ante una escritura conservada. Una escritura así está más cerca del sentimentalismo que de la realidad. El lector siente que la obra peca de sentimentalismo porque las metáforas no son precisas. Para llegar a esas terminaciones nerviosas, una metáfora ha de ser exacta, no aproximada. La metáfora exacta es el oro del escritor.

This book is for Randall Jarrell, the man who believed we are devoted to the act of making literature because it leads to the act of reading.

The life we lead as writers is awful—it's boring, tedious, lonely," -Vivian Gornick

The essay becomes an exercise in the meaning and value of watching a writer conquer their own sense of threat to deliver themself of their wisdom.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a character's predicament, but never to solve his problems.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the "experience of revolution" than to write about it.

I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh chapter, on the 'Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.' But... It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.... For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: "Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws," and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

To hold a pen is to be at war.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.