Quotes About Writing

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

You must keep sending work out you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Cocaine did him in, or morphine—did him in, they say, after he fell from an aeroplane somewhere in the marshes around Novgorod.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.

No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

ISAAC BABEL was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist.

Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend.

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.

If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving...

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them