Quotes About Writing

People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.

Seule la littérature peut vous permettre d'entrer en contact avec l'esprit d'un mort, de manière plus directe, plus complète et plus profonde que ne le ferait même la conversation avec un ami – aussi profonde, aussi durable que soit une amitié, jamais on ne se livre, dans une conversation, aussi complètement qu'on ne le fait devant une feuille vide, s'adressant à un destinataire inconnu.

Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature.

Je me suis souvenue, dit Cécile, que dans le temps tu recopiais des phrases sur un cahier, des phrases d'écrivains, celles que tu trouvais les plus belles.

Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth.

Allein die Literatur erlaubt uns, mit dem Geist eines Toten in Verbindung zu treten, auf direkte, umfassendere und tiefere Weise, als das selbst in einem Gespräch mit einem Freund möglich wäre - denn so tief und dauerhaft eine Freundschaft sein mag, niemals liefert man sich in einem Gespräch so restlos aus, wie man sich einem leeren Blatt ausliefert, das sich an einen unbekannten Empfänger richtet.

The tragedy of banality, produced by ordinary circumstances, and therefore all the more inescapable, remains to be written.

mais un auteur c'est avant tout un être humain, présent dans ses livres, qu'il écrive très bien ou très mal en définitive importe peu, l'essentiel est qu'il écrive et qu'il soit, effectivement, présent dans ses livres

For the most part, contemporary sorjuanistas downplay the role of religious faith and vocation in her life. This understanding of Sor Juana is flawed, I contend, for it is based on a very narrow definition of religious vocation. Too often, the diminishment of Sor Juana's vocation leads to downplaying the significance of Sor Juana's theological and philosophical writing.

But I have nothing for her. Not a single idea. I'm not sure I have another book in me. In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't." "You said that after the last book." Tom took a big bite, chewed until he could talk again. "Maybe you should come back to church. Lots of ideas there.

Ministry does involve a lot of writing," said Sparlo. "And I love the sermon," I blurted. I knew, I went on, that there was much more to church than preaching. The more involved I'd been over the past two years, the greater my interest in church administration, governance, and polity. I didn't know if this interest constituted a call, I said, but I'd been having ministerial ideation for well over a year.

A good sermon has the heft of a solid week's work (at least), yet wears its labor lightly. My homiletics professor said the rule was one hour of work per minute of sermon, say fifteen, sixteen hours on average, which always seemed scant to me. But I'm a slow writer. Then again, ministers don't usually write for publication and good delivery can finesse many an unpolished sentence and awkward transition.

People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard because they don't read it... well, ok, go ahead. Write a bestseller. Don't forget to go through the correct edit process. We'll wait.

For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something...then yeah, they're old enough. LOL

EVERY MAN WITH A LACK OF INCOME AND A TALENT FOR words now believes himself to be a journalist.

Writing and singing does give me some kind of release from the demons of my past, it is a therapy of sorts, but to be honest, my marriage played a more important role in the acceptance of myself than performance has ever done.

One of the joys of reading as a writer is that your eye becomes educated: yes, you may become more critical and abandon a higher percentage of novels halfway through, but when a writer gets it really right, the pleasure and admiration can be all the more intense.

She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.

Usually I write about what I care about, which is a weakness but I think also a strength.

Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.

When we reached the office I started writing urgently. For the first time since I had been compiling profiles I also wrote in the first person singular. I described his general modus operandi as if he was telling it himself. Then I tackled each crime scene separately and, still writing in the first person singular, I described the subtle changes that crept in, how his fantasy developed, the mistakes he made, how he tried to correct them and how he improved.

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

Miguel de Cervantes

It is not the hand but the understanding of a man that may be said to write.