Quotes About Writing

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

Let's not get so ecstatic we ignore the fiscal situation. As my agent so delicately pointed out, most novels--providing they get published--net the author about enough for a new typewriter ribbon and a quart of tequila in which to drown his sorrows when he receives his royalty statement. You will find precious few novelists listed in Dun and Bradstreet.

If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.

I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.

Some write a narrative of wars and feats, Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

David was the kind of guy who was totally supportive of the actors and instructed the writing staff to trust the actor's instincts, since after all, it's the actors playing the character.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

...the curious hunter-up of rare quotations... the young and struggling scribbler...

Indeed a good quotation hardly ever comes amiss. It is a pleasing break in the thread of a speech or writing, allowing the speaker or writer to retire for an instant while another and greater makes himself heard. And this calling-up of the deathless dead implies also a community of mind with them, which the reader will not grudge the author lest he should seem to deny it to himself.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there's one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

Till we come to try to put our own thoughts upon paper, we can have no notion how broke and imperfect they are, or find where the imperfection lies. Language is a scheme of machinery of so subtle a kind, that it is only by long habits that we can learn to conduct it in a masterly manner, or to the best purposes.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence.

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

Loneliness is the diary keeper's lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who "keeps" whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be chored the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may makes it way to the private page. [From "Fifty Literary Pillars", p.35]

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form