Quotes About Writing

Me gustan los escritores que hablan sobre el hecho de escribir y citan continuamente frases de otros autores

No tengo inconveniente en escribir sobre mí mismo. Diría que es casi lo único que hago.

El trabajo de un escritor consiste en vivir intensamente en la calle para después encerrarse solo, en un cuarto, y jugar, soñar, pensar, reflexionar, y finalmente, escribir sobre toda esa gente que ha conocido en la calle. Aunque los escritores saben que no es conveniente reconocer este proceso. Así evitan problemas y reclamaciones posteriores. Yo

You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.

Oddly enough, the more tired you get as you write and rewrite, the more likely you are to abandon any self-conscious semi-stentorian writing and write more like yourself. Fatigue lets you emerge. This is good.)

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Habits of an empowerED teacher: "read, notice, think, make theories about how writing works, imagine possibilities, write yourself; it isn't magic, it's just slow, creative work.

Teachers need to sit with their journal and write in the voice of that teenager. Write and remember. That's who we teach!

What power--what importance--lies in the blank lines of an open notebook. Go and fill yours. Then share.

Good writing makes writers want to write.

Ted looked at Everett's face. "Percival Everett. Didn't you write a book called Erasure ?" Everett nodded. "I didn't like it," Ted said. "Nor I," Everett said. "I didn't like writing it, and I didn't like it when I was done with it." "Well, actually, I loved the novel in the novel. I thought that story was real gripping. You know, true to life." "I've heard that.

She laughed and asked, "What if Shakespeare was just hitting keys?" "Shakespeare didn't have a typewriter," I said. "What if he was just making marks on paper? And that's how he came up with Macbeth?" "I doubt it. Maybe Measure for Measure. I could see that with Measure for Measure. Not Macbeth.

Reading does not occupy me enough: the only relief I find springs from the composition of poetry, which necessitates contemplations that lift me above the stormy mist of sensations which are my habitual place of abode. I have lately been composing a poem on Keats; it is better than anything I have yet written and worthy both of him and of me.

Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.

It should be a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.

From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head's all misshapen and pointy, and you say, "Son, you were born with talent.

It took him one minute to write. Bill stood over him, watching. "I don't know how you do that," he said. "Like the words are already inside the pen." "It's just what's in your brain," Charley said. "The way the words come to you naturally is the best way to put them down." Bill said, "The things in my head don't come in words.

Cautious human beings do not presume to write history on a day's notice. They are aware of the damage mistakes can cause. My father believed that mistakes could always be corrected in the next edition.

She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators. For books are food, she said, for every single one of us.

If you don't want anyone to know anything about you, don't write anything.

Writing touches the unconscious in a way that talking does not. It gets beyond the old, to the truth of the real stories within.

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.