Quotes About Writing

But you don't see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you've missed.

Le romancier est comme un médecin qui ne s'occuperait que des incurables. Et nous sommes tous des incurables.

It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion—from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading—and good writing about reading—moves the same way.

Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them.

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away – of herself.

As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)

No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.

Well, how could he refuse? Besides, Jack's mom and Mrs. Oastler had no idea how the myth of his writing something, which Emma had so presciently set in motion, was now a reality.

It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. (on Tom Wolfe)

I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!

When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable.

What young writer is attracted to a sunny disposition?

I almost always have a notebook with me... a notebook is a nice thing to have in a room, the same way it's nice to have a musical instrument in a stand. .. it makes the household gods happy.

No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.

When I have fears that I may ceace to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teaming brain.

Fine writing, next to doing nothing, is the best thing in the world.

I will stay very little while, for as I am in a train of writing now I fear to disturb it—let it have its course bad or good ...

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain … When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be

Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself.

Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs.

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written...

In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six paragraphs monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some of the tablets, and he realized that several were filled principally with doodling. However, Ignatius thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

I dust a bit," Ignatius told the policeman. "In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.