Quotes About Writing

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. Everything enters something else. My days spill into light-years. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.

This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.

Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them.

A writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear.

Ses textes étaient des poèmes en prose, le genre de choses qu'écrivent les infirmières avant d'assister à leur première amputation.

being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job.

Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence.

We have become dependent upon our technologies to navigate the world, to hold intelligent conversation, to write intelligently, and to remember.

the first edition of this book, then called POET, The Psychology of Everyday Things, I started with these lines: "This is the book I always wanted to write, except I didn't know it." Today I do know it, so I simply say, "This is the book I always wanted to write.

Unless it is your ambition to become a nightclub performer and amaze people with great skills of memory, here is a simpler way to dramatically enhance both memory and accuracy: write things down. Writing is a powerful technology: why not use it? Use a pad of paper, or the back of your hand. Write it or type it. Use a phone or a computer. Dictate it. This is what technology is for. The unaided mind is surprisingly limited. It is things that make us smart. Take advantage of them.

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.

In fact, my experiences as I was writing the 3:16 book weren't that different from writing computer books, although I wasn't using integral signs as much.

Exercise is boring. Everything is boring that does not happen in a chair (reading and writing) or in bed.

Here's a writing craft tool that you can remove from your toolbox and throw away: description. It's the stuff that most readers skim. Even when deftly done using the five senses it's a lead weight. It isn't needed anymore.

Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers' minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader's mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.

When readers feel strongly, their hearts are open. Your stories can not only reach them for a moment, but they can change them forever. I don't care about what you write, how you write it, your choices in publishing, or what you want out of your career. What I want is to feel deeply as I read your work. I want to feel connected to you and your characters in the way I do to the most memorable classics and the most stunning new titles I'll read this year.

So I wrote. I wrote as though God thought my voice mattered. I wrote because I believed a human story was beautiful, no matter how small the human was. I wrote because I didn't make myself, God did. And I wrote like he'd invited me to share my true "self" with the world.

Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up.

I'm a writer because, at an early age, I became convinced it was the one thing I could do to earn people's respect. It's true in the process I learned to love words and ideas and these days I actually like to get lost in the writing process. But the early fuel, the early motivation, was all about becoming a person worth loving.

The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.

Be Specific. Be Visual. The biggest mistake people make when it comes to writing their value proposition is they aren't specific enough.