Quotes About Writing

You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.

the story, the part that was above water, without the writer voicing it. Writing was a craft, and it had rules, which, if they had to be reduced to a single concept, dictated that the writer be genuine.

For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.

I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.

Less happily, however, we are beginning to observe the direct and indirect influence of the digital word-spotting, text-grazing reading patterns of contemporary readers—how things are read—on how texts are being written. When publishers are forced to consider the needs

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, writers, and thinkers.

When we reflect that "sentence"10 means, literally, "a way of thinking" . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

I got the idea from Lumawoo's cannibal book,

got the idea from Lumawoo's cannibal book,

Writing to you is like some embarrassing remake of Waiting For Godot. Why don't you jerk off on paper in my direction, as I've done. I am so unhappy it's amusing.

There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ even if you write it yourself.

Writing is an act of discovery in which you peel back the layers of the story as you write it down.

Your lyrics lack subtlety! You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!

I want life. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.

Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option , I suppose , is that you write a book.

Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

That is why I write. I am just for ever running from madness.

when you write with a pen it is like writing with a part of yourself like it is another finger.

Kurt Vonnegut was right. "Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you," wrote Angelou. Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can't speak, we can write. When we can't write, we can read. When we can't read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.