Quotes About Writing

WRITER Actors come and go, pal—you guys are the furniture, okay? What I write is the house. Let's not get all precious about it . . .

Writing is defined as "a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.

other forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and writing.

Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity.

she's sure she's going to be the next J. K. Rowling.

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it.

With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore... Because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standards secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today... (Sept. 1953 letter to Millen Brand)

n Mens het letterkunde in jou lewe nodig, want daarsonder gaan jy agteruit.

Sempre fui um autor correndo atrás da metáfora, das mais desvairadas metáforas. O adjetivo é minha tara estilística.

When you choose to write down compelling goals, you are simultaneously choosing a compelling future. Exciting goals foreshadow an exciting future.

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.

Allora, come va il tuo libro, Ruth?' mi ha chiesto Timmy. 'Ruth vuol fare la scrittrice' ha spiegato a Packy. In realtà io non volevo fare la scrittrice, volevo fare la lettrice , aspirazione assai più rara. Ma sai com'è, una cosa tira l'altra.

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

building a tower of description that was in constant danger of toppling over as more and more clauses were thrown on to it, adjectives and adverbs, bounteous, haltingly, found in pockets and pitched on, similes not spared, prepositions dangling and otherwise, metaphors

He had no intention of writing. He loved reading, that was all. And he read books that he thought so far beyond anything that he himself could dream of achieving that any thought of writing instantly evaporated into the certainty of failure.