Quotes About Writing

A writer and his work is and should be like a surly dog with a bone, suspicious of everyone, trusting no one, loving no one. It's hard to justify such a life but that's the way it is if it is done well.

Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.

In 1963 Steinbeck told Caskie Stinnett: I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process. Though Steinbeck actually wrote the novel in ninety-three sittings, it was his way of saying that The Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion. p xxxviii

And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it otherwise might have been.

AÄŸz?nla söyleyemeyeceÄŸin bir ÅŸeyi, kaleme dayan?p yazmak neye yarar?

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom - some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my life, is the reason why I write.

The thing is, all the stuff that people hate about the art world, I love. I embrace all the elitism. I think it's hilarious. I love impenetrable art writing. I make fun of it, but I make fun of things I love. I don't hate the art world at all. I find it fascinating. It's a secret club; you have to learn the rules.

A kind of losing loadum is their game, Where the worst writer has the greatest fame.

The trick to learning Chinese is to always carry the flashcards into work every time, and also to write Chinese letters to your children.

Writing is how I process the cacophony of each day. Prayer is how God makes sense out of my scribbles.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, "without hard labour," and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.

The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful

I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.

There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.

Actually, I find it great fun to develop family series with lots of characters.