Quotes About Writing

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember . Remember us. Remember me.

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade

All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

In his writing, capitals popped up in his sentences like lost gophers.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition. Clear back to "Don Quixote." I never decided to write in a "new way" at all. It's realism that's fairly new. Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

If I'm going to spend a lifetime writing my story, I want it to mean something.

A wonderful thing one learns when one writes about imaginary kingdoms for a living is that, in fact, anyone can imagine anything, and if the writer is good, they can do it persuasively.

Madame de Staël understood literature to include philosophy, history, social and political writing.

There are two of you- one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write better keep tricking the one who doesn't.

Thus prepared, I was able to proceed to new experiments on my own account. This is not the place for a report of these experiments, and I will only note that at this time I attempted an original method for the teaching of reading and writing, a part of the education of the child which was most imperfectly treated in the works of both Itard and Séguin.

I stressed out trying to figure out what I could say. I ate licorice. I stressed some more. I ate Dots. I stressed out even more-and wiped out a bag of Swedish Fish. And then I wrote.

I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Bedizened or starknaked, man, the self, the being we call human,writingmaster to this world.

in which letters are written / not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!