Quotes About Writing

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

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This action makes me remember my strength which I forget at all times. I educate myself proportionately to my captured thought. I aim only to distinguish the contradiction between my mind and nothingness.

MUDIE MEASURE Ten lines make one page; Ten pages make one point; Two points make one chapter; Five chapters make one episode; Two episodes make one volume; Three volumes make one tired.

How well I would write if I were not here!

The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.

There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel.

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.

The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.

No, writing has not changed me for the better at all; I have merely used up part of my restless, conscienceless youth. What value to me will these discontented pages be? The book, the vow, are worth no more than one is worth oneself. One can never be sure of saving one's soul by writing. One may go writing on and on with a soul already lost.

All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.

The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.

The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.

nh?ng có lúc ngòi bút ch? rào r?o b?i m?c, không l?n ch?y b?ng m?t gi?t ??i, và cu?c ??i thì toàn b? ?n goài kia, bên ngoài ô c?a s?, bên ngoài b?n, và b?n c?m th?y mình s? không bao gi? còn có th? n??ng náu n?i trang gi?y b?n ?ang vi?t

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.