Quotes About Writing

Be brave. Write plainly.

Creo que mis escritores favoritos son los que reconocieron que no podían vivir sin escribir. (...), tipos para los que escribir era tan esencial como el aire y el agua. Escribir o morir intentándolo. Esa forma de pensar coincide conmigo. Por eso estoy aquí.

Lo que más odio de escribir en la era digital es que todo acaba por desaparecer. Es como escribir cartas que se evaporan en el aire después de que uno las lea. Por eso hago copias. El papel dura siempre.

He has a frightening aversion to text messaging in general. "It's a phone. It's for making calls, not for writing novels".

There was a time when I thought I turned terrible things over in my mind because I read and wrote too many scary stories. (Note self: start writing about unicorns and bunnies)

I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.

I believe it is the inability of beginning writers to achieve at least a certain degree of detachment from their writing that defeats so many of them before they even get started. Without this distancing, any criticism of your writing will seem devastating, even incapacitating, whereas with the proper amount of detachment it will seem merely cruel and unusual punishment.

A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds that it is his life

This is an introduction for those who desire an intuitive grasp of Derridean "thought" that makes a difference, that gains traction in one's life. Writing is the central concept for Derrida. This writing, however, must be understood as inscription, the line that at once limits and defines, as boundedness. Writing is also a heuristic device in the service of what I will call constitutive difference.

In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have no faith. But I live in hope.

Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.

Of all the punctuation marks, he told me, ellipses were his favorite.

De tous les caractères d'imprimerie, il m'avait dit qu'il préférait les points de suspensions.

Je me rends compte aujourd'hui qu'il m'a fallu écrire deux cents pages pour capter, inconsciemment, un vague reflet de la réalité.

I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.

You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions.

But the thing about good ideas is that they grow other ideas. Almost before I could help it, Siobhan's ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.

Copyright (C) 2012 by Michael Swanwick

Copyright (C) 2012 by Charles Stross

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

I learned to love the feel of good words.

Hours later the blank sheet still stared at me, and I beat my fist against the desk in fury and fustration, striking it so hard my hand bled. That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.

But it isn't a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.