Quotes About Writing

escribir siempre sería una renuncia. Un exilio. Una manera de fingir que uno sale al encuentro del otro cuando en realidad rumia, digiere, regurgita, mastica, relame, traga, se nutre, defeca sus propias e intransferibles palabras...

tal vez, las cosas que nos mueven a hablar son las únicas cosas sobre las que merece la pena escribir.

Emily could hardly get up in the morning without metaphors and images flooding her mind. Often her letters to Austin took on the appearance of a composition exercise, as if she were trying to freeze a moment in words and capture not only the look, but also the feel of an instant.

Emily always turned to language to soothe or lessen her distress. The letters could have served as a reminder of the pain she had experienced, but survived. Whatever purpose she had in writing remained a secret known only to her. She never shied away from looking anguish in the eye or contemplating its aftermath. To do so was an act of dominion over misery and resistance to inertia.

If I were a first rate writer, I wouldn't mind a bit. What does depress me is this: it is so desperately hard and so obsessive and so lonely to write that, in return for all this work, one would like a little self satisfaction. And that is never going to come, for the simple reason that I do not deserve it. I cannot be a good enough writer. You see? I call it grim. But the future looks awfully clear to me.

I want to read and write and be very quiet.

I felt both puny and pretentious, trying to write in the grandeur of that natural world where everything was older than time and I was the briefest object in the landscape.

She tried, leaning back and closing her eyes, to put in order what she had seen, heard, and what she had known before. She wanted to place her knowledge in paragraphs ( a good opening sentence? she thought), so that it would be easy to handle when she came to write it. But it did not fit in paragraphs and she could not see it, plain and informative, colourful but unimpassioned, on a page. There was no beginning, no middle, no end.

Dr. Soekarno was always exactly what he was in the beginning, a whizz-bang demagogue, an opportunist, just another little dictator. U.S. officialdom never tires of backing that type. Nor does U.S. officialdom take sufficient note of the writing on the wall, such as: Down With All Whites. I wonder what the phrase looks like in Vietnamese.

Polly was a writer of many deadlines. There were the ignorable deadlines, the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously deadlines: the deadlines-before-the-deadlines deadlines, and finally, the no-kidding-around deadlines. She set these various dates, she'd told him, to fool herself.

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do -- like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

Prefer the active voice unless there's a good reason for using the passive

Use clear, crisp, lively verbs to express the actions in your document, and avoid using noun strings.

More people fear snakes than full stops, so they recoil when a long sentence comes hissing across the page.

Put accurate punctuation at the heart of your writing.

You don't have anything new to say, Ethelred, but you carry on writing crime novels. I mean, it's fine. Your readers don't like new stuff. It frightens the shit out of them.

Marjorie Luesebrink of Irvine Valley College convinced me I could write fiction at a time when, in retrospect, it's clear