Quotes About Writing

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

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.

The only patient being treated by the writer is himself

So I said, and quickly reached for my glass so as to duck my disingenuous face and take a bitter drop of brandy on my tongue. But Lonoff had read my designing mind, all right; for when I came upon Babel's description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, "and blood in his penis," and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul's smithy.

no, a mí no se me habría pasado por la cabeza abandonar la familia y la fábrica para dedicar todo mi tiempo a escribir, como él hizo.

Around three A.M., I left my bed and went to my desk, my head vibrant with the static of unelaborated thought.

This is what happens when you write books. There's not just something that drives you to find out everything—something begins putting everything in your path.

I would quit while you're ahead. Really, it's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.

Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind.

The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it - write well .

The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.

I would quit while you're ahead. Really. It's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.

For nothing from my wit or will doth flow, Since all my words thy beauty doth endite, And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.

As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page.

But seeing those words that were first written, and scratched out, and rewritten again in print and bound into a book, I know that I love the process of writing and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world—this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.

D'you think I can't write this and get someone-a drunk married to a fool -to swear to it? Do you think I can't sey up as historian? As storyteller? D'you think I can't write a history which years from now everyone will believe as the truth? I am the king. Who shall write the record of my reign if not me? 'You can say anything you like' I say levelly. 'Of course you can. You're King of England. But it doesn't make it true.

Derrida s'intéressait moins au roman qu'à l'écriture, et ce qui l'a fasciné c'est le fait que j'ai fait de l'écriture un roman.

Nombres est écrit avant mai 1968, coïncidence improbable mais profonde.

Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.