Quotes About Writing

Aunque ellos mismos lo ignoren, ningún creador escribe para los otros, ni para sí mismo, ni mucho menos para satisfacer un anhelo de creación, sino porque no puede dejar de escribir.

I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.

i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.

Scrivendo, invece, servo a qualcosa. Vi sono tanti modi per fare la politica vista come nobile impegno, dovere. Io la faccio scrivendo.

Le opere postume hanno lo squisito vantaggio di risparmiarti le scemenze o le perfidie di coloro che senza saper scrivere e neanche concepire un romanzo pretendono di giudicare anzi bistrattare chi lo concepisce e lo scrive.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come if you don't, there's no hope for you.

All great writers are actors, even merely competent ones are. They have the actor's capacity for getting inside the skins of their leading characters and transfiguring them- whatever they may be, even murderers- with what they can give of themselves. They do that quite as much as actors do.

Show me what you've written," I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.

I drew with extremely excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink.

Even now, I barely have the strength to reread what I've written.

I wanted to write only what I wanted to write.

I live solely on my writing now. On signing the registers at inns when I travel, I have no hesitation about listing "writer" as my occupation. If I suffer, I don't talk much about it much. I may suffer even more than before, but I wear a smile.

I'm afraid I don't really have a clear understanding of the psychology of the powerful- particularly the absolutely invincible variety, which I've never met or known to exist. I'm a story writer with such feeble imaginative powers that unless I myself have experienced something, I can't write one line- I can't write a word- about it.

The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Si pudiera me gustaría escribir con amor; pero si pudiera escribir con amor sería un hombre distinto al que soy.

Wer für Kinder schreibt, übt den Beruf des Schriftstellers unter erschwerten Bedingungen aus, und dies freiwillig ... Wer für Erwachsene schreibt, schreibt ausschließlich für Erwachsene. Wer für Kinder schreibt, schreibt automatisch für Erwachsene mit." [As quoted on Preußler's official website .]

for the time being I gave up writing-there is already too much truth in the world-an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed!

Ouida's first novel was published in three volumes in 1863, though it had previously been released in serial form as Granville de Vigne in The New Monthly magazine from January 1861 to June 1863, as was the common practice at the time. The author was only twenty-four years old at the time, but was later to claim that this was not her first attempt at writing and that her 1867 novel Idalia was written when she was just sixteen.

One good way to inventory ourselves is to ask ourselves questions about specific character traits. Then we examine in writing the ways that we've exhibited these characteristics in our lives. For instance, we might ask ourselves if we have been prideful. Have arrogance and false pride characterized our behavior? If so, we list them in our inventory. Then, we illustrate the characteristic of pride by listing examples of how pride has caused us to act.

Whatever I tried to write was verse.