Quotes About Writing

I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

When one writes, there's the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.

As for inspiration, I find stark fear of missing the deadline very inspiring.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.

That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.

Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.

Did you know the pen is stronger than the knife: they can kill you once but they can't kill you twice.

There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

She realized as a girl of eight that if she sat down and wrote her stories, she could escape the parts of life she didn't like, embroider the parts she did and thus control the life she had.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Until now, I had reckoned only that I had not the 'gift' for writing; now M. de Norpois took from me the ambition also.

And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes, I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain kept it from being born.

Ressaisir notre vie ; et aussi la vie des autres ; car le style, pour l'écrivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique, mais de vision. Il est la révélation, qui serait impossible par des moyens directs et conscients, de la différence qualitative qu'il y a dans la façon dont nous apparaît le monde, différence qui, s'il n'y avait pas l'art, resterait le secret éternel de chacun.

To my ear, Bergotte's way of speaking was completely different from his way of writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books. A voice emerges from a mask; unaided, it is not up to showing us immediately a face we have glimpsed naked in a style.

After all," I said to myself, "possibly the pleasure that its author has found in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; it may be only an accessory, one that is often to be found superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning.

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And 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.

Si j'avais vos dispositions, je crois bien que j'écrirais du matin au soir

Thus God, whose will it is that a few well-written books should exist, breathes disdain into the hearts of the Mmes Leroi, for He knows that, should they invite the Mmes de Villeparisis to dinner, then these would immediately leave their writing desks and order their carriages for eight o'clock.