Quotes About Writing

Obviously, we can't cut all prepositions, nor should we try. But keeping them to a minimum offers a quick route to clarity, simplicity, and brevity.

A useful guideline is to limit to three the numbers in a sentence—three seems to be all the reader's brain can

Writers sometimes don't realize that an inherently dramatic tale is made even more dramatic through focus, purpose, compression, and underwriting. They often overwrite the dramatic story, which paradoxically drains it of its strength.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.

it struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

I don't exactly know, but it feels important to go there. It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it. Everything's changing so fast. I want to believe in something while there's still time. I want to tell the truth, even when it's difficult. And I want to find the story I'm meant to write.

Something was missing in my life—in me—and I thought writing could fill it or fix it, or cure me of myself.

We were involved for nearly five years. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of what I was doing and bolt away from him, my knapsack stuffed with the tattered draft of my first novel, meaning to finally get serious. But he quickly raced after me, again and again, and the same old chaos resumed.

I want to write something, but I don't think I can without being emotional." "Just make a start. Begin anywhere." "It might be terrible." "It might be. That's not the worst thing." "No," I agreed. And it wasn't. The worst thing—I already knew it—would be feeling too scared to try.

Obviously he'd seen my own failings in the pages, though I'd only meant to show him how clever my dialogue was, and how gaspingly well I'd described the sea.

Write, and do it now instead of capitalizing on your nice figure and your pretty hair. Stop being so charming." The sting of his words made me dizzy. My ears rang. "If I am charming it's your fault and Mother's." "You're just afraid to be lonely.

I want to write one true sentence, he said. If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I'll be satisfied.

Thomas E has already told me that he had to write a tweet for English and that his teacher liked his rough draft. Alley's

He turned the page. He said, This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world.

Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought. Adair

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Tears are words that need to be written.

A coerência não é, porém, imobilizante. Posso, no processo de agir-pensar, falar, escrever, mudar de posição. Minha coerência assim, tão necessária quanto antes, se faz com novos parâmetros. O impossível para mim é a falta de coerência, mesmo reconhecendo a impossibilidade de uma coerência absoluta.

Escrevo. E pronto. Escrevo porque preciso, preciso porque estou tonto. Ninguém tem nada com isso. Escrevo porque amanhece e as estrelas lá no céu lembram letras no papel, quando o poema me anoitece. A aranha tece teias. O peixe beija e morde o que vê. Eu escrevo apenas. Tem que ter por quê?

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.