Quotes About Writing

It doesn't matter where or how far you go - the farther commonly the worse - the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we're out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we're sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.

Myslím, že nejsem ani básník, ani spisovatel, ani umÄ›lec. Ale ?lovÄ›k, který nenaÅ¡el jiný zp?sob, jak z?stat ve styku s životem, jak se udržet nad hladinou. Psal jsem, jako se chytáme záchranného pásu.

I have, as may be apparent, not much respect for editors as a class.

Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!

La Vita o si vive o si scrive

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

For the plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before he begins.

Even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know...

The clearest argument against Plato's authorship is probably that Plato never wrote a work whose interpretation was as simple and straightforward as that of Alcibiades.

Handwriting is the shackle of the mind.

And is it not best to understand what is said, whether at the writing-master's or the music-master's, or anywhere else, not as quietly as possible, but as quickly as possible? Yes.

Chi è serio, si guarda bene dallo scrivere di cose serie.

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust

If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

I don't think it is possible to give tips for finding one's voice; it's one of those things for which there aren't really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible.

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.

The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi's writing.

Oggi, questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute.

Scrivendo trovavo breve pace e mi sentivo ridiventare un uomo, uno come tutti, nè martire nè infame nè santo, uno di quelli che si fanno una famiglia, e guardano al futuro anzichè al passato. - Il sistema periodico

Se è vero che non c'è maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria, è altrettanto vero che rievocare un'angoscia ad animo tranquillo, seduti quieti alla scrivania, è fonte di soddisfazione profonda.

Se è vero che non c'è maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria, è altrettanto vero che rievocare un'angoscia ad animo tranquillo, seduti quieti alla scrivania, è fonte di soddisfazione profonda.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.