Quotes About Writing

People think writing is an easy job, and in some ways it is. Flexible hours, no boss, no real structure . . . but working without any structure is a bit like sailing a boat in the middle of the ocean. All it takes is an unexpected wave and you're dead in the water.

At night, Paul became part of an imaginary world where he felt happy, in the company of characters who had become his friends. When he was writing, anything was possible.

C'est peut-être cela, finalement, aimer vraiment. Apprendre à pardonner, sans réserve et surtout sans regrets. Poser son doigt sur la touche d'un clavier, effacer les pages grises pour tout récrire en couleur. Mieux encore, se battre pour que tout finisse bien.

English had been used since the start of the seventh century to draft administrative documents,

such as charters and law codes, but never employed for great works of literature, theology or philosophy,

William Shakespeare: I have a wife, yes, and I cannot marry the daughter of Sir Robert De Lesseps. You needed no wife come from Stratford to tell you that, and yet, you let me come to your bed. Viola De Lesseps: Calf-love. I loved the writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.

Viola De Lesseps: You have never spoken so well of him before. William Shakespeare: He was not dead before.

WILL is burning midnight oil- literally and metaphorically. His quill has already covered a dozen sheets. He is inspired.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

The only reward you can ask from writing is the chance to keep doing it.

At the rate these illuminations appear, it will no doubt take me a long time to gather the material for even one single book. For my inspired double-- this phantom builder of sentences who maliciously impedes my work to dictate his clever discoveries-- always comes at those (infrequent) hours of his choosing, drafts (at best) three little pages, then goes away.

I long believed that one was born a writer, that it was enough to allow to ripen within oneself for an appropriate number of years this precious seed, and that then one day the first book would appear, as had earlier, at the appointed hour, the first tooth. 53

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (...) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.

It was evident to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever,

La tristesse des hommes qui ont vieilli c'est de ne pas même songer à écrire de telles lettres dont ils ont appris l'inefficacité.

real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him!

when we try to extract generality from our sorrow so as to write about it we are a little consoled, perhaps for another reason than those I have hitherto given, which is, that thinking in a general way, writing is a sanitary and indispensable function for the writer and gives him satisfaction in the same way that exercise, sweating and baths do a physical man.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

Had anyone written and divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest life, misusing and forfeiting the esteem had of his reason among men, if after conviction this only censure were adjudged him that he should never henceforth write

Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That's the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.