Quotes About Writing

We forget what we say much more than what we hear, what we write much more than what we read, what we send much more than what we receive, and that is why we barely count the insults we hand out to others, unlike those dealt out to us, which is why almost everyone harbors some grudge against someone.

One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a "national treasure," is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.

Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah.

Putting pen to paper is a mystical way to access your most profound truths.

You cannot write to save your soul. given up it drifts and does the singing.

Everyone who writes with care, who treats words with respect and allows even the humblest its historical and grammatical dignity, participates in the exhilarating work of reclamation. Each essay or poem is its own "raid on the inarticulate," and every written work that forestalls the slow death of speech is a response to Wendell Berry's challenge to "practice resurrection.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

It's almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.

Writer's block is just another name for fear.

If you're frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you'll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You've done the time but wonder if it's going to satisfy the judge.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.

One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment.

As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.

I've learned to sell my music, I've learned to direct, I've written screenplays... All of this fulfilled my artistic needs but also put food on the table.

I don't think I've ever read a food piece or a food book.

I always was going to be a writer. The other jobs were just to keep me in food. Though I enjoyed the archaeology.