Quotes About Writing

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip. ? John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Y qué anda haciendo ahora esa Myrna? —preguntó con suspicacia la señora Reilly—. ¿Cómo es que escribe tanto? Ella sí que necesitaba un buen baño, qué chica aquella, Dios. —La psique de Myrna sólo puede tratar con el agua en un contexto oral. —¿Qué? —¿Querrías tener la bondad de dejar de gritar como una pescadera y largarte? ¿No tienes una botella de moscatel haciéndose en el horno?

He's sitting in his room right now writing some foolishness. I says, `What's that you writing now, boy?' And he say, `I'm writing about being a weenie vendor.' Ain't that terrible? Who want to read a story like that? You know how much he brought home from that weenie place today? Four dollars. How I'm gonna pay off that man?

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.

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known.

I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft.

George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose "Woodcraft," published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word?

For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream.

I wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, bad. And that's how I found out—by doing it.

Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place.

You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write.

Since you may take a month, or ten months, or several years to turn one idea into a piece of writing

The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don't use the lead.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

We do not truly own our thoughts or experiences until we have negotiated them with ourselvesand for this writing is the prime medium.

A native of America who cannot read or write is . . . as rare as a comet or an earthquake.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.