Quotes About Writing

Although CALLIE BATES'S cancer is well into remission, she still wears her purple wig when she wants to feel like a rock star. A recent graduate of the International Harp Therapy Program, she lives in Wisconsin. Her other writing projects include a nonfiction book reflecting on her cancer experience and diverse novels. Her selection in this anthology, "The Purple Wig," is her first published work. MELISSA

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.

Escric perquè m'agrada escriure. Si no em semblés exagerat diria que escric per agradar-me a mi. Si de retop el que escric agrada als altres, millor. Potser és més profund. Potser escric per afirmar-me. Per sentir que sóc... I acabo. He parlat de mi i de coses essencials en la meva vida, amb una certa manca de mesura. I la desmesura sempre m'ha fet molta por

Escribir bien cuesta. Por escribir bien entiendo decir con la máxima simplicidad las cosas esenciales.

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.

My best time as a writer is any day, or any moment, when the work's going well and I'm completely absorbed in the task at hand. The hardest time is when it's not, and I'm not. The latter tend to outnumber the former. But I'm a persistent little cuss. And I soldier on.

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book. —Gloria Swanson

I wrote it for insomniacs at three in the morning who were wondering how they'd get through the next day. And I wrote it for my past self, that girl who promised herself she'd write a book someday.

Blue Plate Special was the most difficult book I've ever written, as well as the easiest. The material was all there. I just had to find the thread, weave it through, and tie it together at the end. No big deal. Ha! It was agony a lot of the time. Ecstasy the rest of the time. Such a roller coaster. I kept vacillating between "I can't do this, it's too hard" and "God, this is fun.

Huonokin teksti on aina parempi kuin ei tekstiä ollenkaan. Huono teksti on lähtökohta, mutta jos teksti puuttuu, ei ole mitään.

Kaikessa kirjoittamisessa on tietenkin kaksi puolta: totta kai täytyy olla jotain mistä kirjoittaa, mutta täytyy myös osata kirjoittaa.

Tottumaton kirjoittaja saattaa kuvitella, että ensin mietitään mitä halutaan kirjoittaa, niin että se on valmiina päässä ennen kirjoittamista, mutta oikeastaan ei voi tietää mitä ajattelee ennen kuin alkaa kirjoittaa, sillä kirjoittaessaan ajattelee

I worked through memories like weeping wounds. I wrote tedious accounts of petty conflicts and read them aloud to people. I removed layer after layer of rot.

Ono Å¡to nije zapisano, i ne postoji; bilo pa umrlo.

Então, as letras, uma por uma, se vão convertendo em grãos de areia e, aos poucos, todos meus escritos se vão transformando em páginas de terra.

está-se escritor, não se é escritor. (...) o caminhar de um leão é uma dança em busca de corpo, o seu olhar foi feito para nos paralisar e nos roubar os sentidos. (...) O escritor faz?se como todas as pessoas se fazem: olhando o mundo como se fosse pela primeira vez e descobrindo no Tempo algo que pode ainda ser estreado.

I don't think of myself as a writer. I'm troubled and stupid like everyone else. I grew up with the streets. I have dead friends, friends in prison, friends who are prostitutes, on drugs, drunk, married to shitty men. I write because I need to write, to make sense of life. Honesty is everything to me.

I write the books I want to write. I'm delighted if they sell well and I'm not expecting my publishers to just keep giving me money, but there's no way I want to bow to commercial pleasure. I mean, there's plenty of people publishing very good commercial stuff. If my stuff is commercial that's great, but it's not why I write.

Love goes on. The love of friends. Friendship is my oxygen. I've said that often and it's true. Writing goes on too: I keep on building my paper house; my chrysalis

I was brought up in a tradition of reading and thinking at university that, in a sense, left the body out. It was all about your mind. That good writing didn't have a "self" in it, didn't have an ego in it. Oh my God, I had so much to unlearn when I became a writer!

A book is from your heart and mind, it is your love put to words.

he has never learned the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

I can't stop writing you. You, the pleasure which exiled me for awhile. You of the whom dream, the bell swinging with echoes of two or three notes as if from another bird, before the major echoes from the same voice. I did not intentionally walk shores of light. I said my heart is sick because it is not full …

I told him that the lawyers were always saying 'You can't say that you'll get sued.' He said to me, 'Write fiction Michael, you can tell the truth.' (Kirk Douglas to Michael Caine)